A simple photonic precoding-less scheme for vector millimeter-wave signal generation based on a single phase modulator

We propose and verify a simple precoding-less scheme to generate quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulated vector millimeter-wave signal based on a single phase modulator (PM). The electrical vector data is first up-converted to achieve a 12 GHz radio frequency (RF) vector signal, then the RF vector signal is added with the other unmodulated RF source at 18 GHz, of which the generations are enabled by a digital signal processing (DSP). Next, the coupled RF source drive a PM to generate multi-frequency optical sidebands. A wavelength selective switch is adopted to pick out two optical sidebands at different frequencies which will beat frequency in the photo-detector (PD). In this scheme, we set up a simulation platform to generate 48 GHz QPSK modulated vector millimeter-wave signals and analyzed the performance. The results show when the input power for the generated 1-Gbaud/s vector millimeter-wave into PD is not less than -18 dBm, the bit-error ratio can be below 3.8 x 10(-3), which demonstrate that the generated vector millimeter-wave signal enabled by our proposed scheme can work well.