Investigation of broadband digital predistortion for broadband radio over fiber transmission systems

In future broadband cloud radio access networks (C-RAN), front-haul transmission systems play a significant role in performance and cost of C-RAN. Broadband and high linearity radio over fiber (RoF) transmission systems are considered a promising solution for the front-haul. Digital linearization is one possible solution for RoF front-haul. In this paper, we investigate RF domain digital predistortion (DPD) linearization for broadband RoF front-haul. The implemented DPD is first investigated in 2.4 GHz WiFi over fiber transmission systems at 36 Mb/s, and more than 8-dB and 5.6-dB improvements of error vector magnitude (EVM) are achieved in back to back (BTB) and after 10 km single mode fiber (SMF) transmission. Further, both WiFi and ultra wide band (UWB) wireless signals are transmitted together, in which the DPD has linearization bandwidth of 2.4 GHz. It is shown that the implemented DPD leads to EVM improvements of 4.5-dB (BTB) and 3.1-dB (10 km SMF) for the WiFi signal, and 4.6-dB (BTB) and 4-dB (10 km SMF) for the broadband UWB signal. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.