Probabilistic Amplitude Shaping to Enhance ARoF Fronthaul Capacity for Mm-Wave 5G/6G Systems

Analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) technology has proven to be a promising solution to be part of the future millimeter-wave (mm-wave) 5G/6G architecture due to its attractive benefits such as simplified remote antenna units (RAUs), low-power consumption, and low cost. However, ARoF channels present hefty drawbacks, such as phase noise and nonlinear effects, that need to be addressed. The probabilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) technique is able to reduce the impact of such drawbacks, allowing a fine optimization of channel capacity usage. In particular, enumerative sphere shaping (ESS) implementation stands out as an excellent PAS approach because of its energy-efficiency and low complexity for short blocklengths. In this work, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, an ESS scheme is evaluated in an experimental bidirectional mm-wave ARoF setup oriented towards 5G communications. Furthermore, a novel soft ESS demapping algorithm is proposed and explained. The experimental results confirm the ESS technique, together with the proposed algorithm, as a convenient solution to enhance the channel capacity use of mm-wave ARoF systems for the 5G/6G fronthaul.