Toward Terabit Digital Radio over Fiber Systems: Architecture and Key Technologies

To support massive deployment of broadband radio applications, such as 5G and high-definition videos for terrestrial televisions, large system capacity and high spectrum efficiency are highly demanded in radio over fiber (RoF) systems. In this article, we propose a terabit digital RoF system capable of providing high-speed transmission, where multicore fiber (MCF) is introduced for the access segment between the central unit and remote unit. Two key technologies that greatly enhance system capacity and spectrum efficiency, namely MCF enabled self-homodyne detection and compressed quantization, are demonstrated.