Experimental Demonstration of MASH Based Sigma Delta Radio over Fiber System for 5G C-RAN Downlink

Sigma Delta Radio over Fiber (S-DRoF) systems are looked upon as an enabling technology due to their advantages that comes due to combination of analog and digital radio over fiber (RoF) systems. In this paper, we have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a Multi-stAge-noise-SHaping (MASH) based Sigma Delta Modulated RoF system targeting 5G C-RAN (cloud/centralized radio access network) fronthaul applications. The evaluation has been done for LTE 20 MHz signal having 256 quadrature amplitude modulation with a carrier frequency of 3.5 GHz up to 5 Km of Standard Single Mode Fiber (SSMF). Furthermore, a comprehensive analysis of the design is explained followed by the experimental setup. The performance is reported in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM) and adjacent channel leakage ratio. It is concluded that S-DRoF substantiates the desired range of the 5G C-RAN fronthaul networks.