Correcting the Chromatic Dispersion of a Fronthaul Fiber link in Millimeter-Wave Radio-over-Fiber Networks

Fulfilling the requirements of 5G NR, the 5th generation mobile network equipped with advanced features such as network MIMO and multi-user diversity, new and more advanced fronthaul design is needed. Analog radio over fiber has been proposed to provide high bandwidth signals with simple receiver architecture from the baseband unit to the remote radio heads. At such a high data rate, fiber distortions, i.e. chromatic dispersion, become significant and need to be compensated. Here we study applying a simple optical filter implemented by means of fiber Bragg grating technique and evaluate its performance for various scenarios through numerical simulations. It is evident from the observed results that the proposed approach is effective in increasing the reach and providing reliable communication with simple implementation.