Full-duplex transmission of IEEE 802.11ac-compliant MIMO WLAN signals over a 2-km 7-core fiber

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate a full-duplex transmission system of IEEE 802.11ac-compliant multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signals over a 2-km 7-core fiber for in-building wireless local-area network (WLAN) distributed antenna systems. For full-duplex 3 x 3 MIMO demonstration, the crosstalk impacts of both fiber-transmission-only and optic-wireless transmission situation are evaluated. The results indicate that the impact of crosstalk on radio-over-fiber (ROF) link performance is not significant and the quality of the cascaded multi-core fiber and wireless channel is mainly determined by the wireless part. To further improve the system capacity, polarization multiplexing (PolMux) technology is employed to achieve a full-duplex 6 x 6 MIMO over a single 7-core fiber. Although employing the PolMux method will slightly decrease the EVM and condition number performance as opposed to a non-PolMux MCF system, it is still a competitive solution in large optical connection demand scenarios that require a low cost.