Digitized radio-over-fiber (D-RoF) transport schemes are being pointed as viable alternative solutions to their analog counterparts, in order to avoid distortion/dynamic range problems. Here we propose a novel D-RoF architecture that takes advantage of a bandpass sigma-delta modulator at the transmitter which subsequently permits the usage of a simpler/cheaper base station that avoids the employment of a digital to analog converter. The proposed architecture exploits the properties of the digital signal to enable the extraction of an higher carrier frequency through the employment of a bandpass filter. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive analysis regarding the impact of a low-cost electro-optic modulation on the quality of received demodulated signal. Finally, a comparison performance analysis between the conventional D-RoF and the proposed architecture is presented. We conclude that although the proposed architecture performs similarly to conventional D-RoF schemes, it is more competitive for either upgrading installed systems as well as for new deployments.

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IntroductionThe Daphne project has been addressing the adoption of an optical fiber infrastructure for future aircrafts. Beyond the obvious motivation of reduced weight and electromagnetic interference, the availability of a huge amount of bandwidth makes the optical fiber well suited to transport Radio Frequency (RF) signals transparently, while avoiding cumbersome dedicated RF cabling. An integrated optical network may be exploited to transport radio signals from diverse aircraft antennas ranging from satellite/earth communications, collision avoidance, GPS signals for positioning and attitude determination, weather/detection RADAR to corrosion sensors. Such network can also support passenger infotainment and mobile communication services, such as cellular GSM/UMTS/LTE, broadband Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and Ultra-Wide-Band Wimedia/WiGig. Specifically, the optical fiber infrastructure may provide connectivity from external antennas (through remote nodes) to RF transceivers installed in the cockpit and avionics bay (head-end nodes); in the context of the present paper, the transmission of differential GPS signals used to provide aircraft attitude information will be discussed. The use of GPS for aircraft attitude determination has been under discussion for more than 20 years [1]. It consists in performing carrier-phase differential processing of measurements from GPS antennas affixed to the frame of the aircraft, which yields centimeter-or millimeter-level accuracies, provided that integer phase ambiguities are resolved [2]. The attitude algorithm consists in a highly accurate real time kinematic (RTK) technique, given the short baseline distance between antennas, in which the main antenna acts as a Base station and two auxiliary antennas as Rovers. In the present experiment, we used a setup consisting of two-antennas (Base and Rover), which is enough to evaluate the RTK performance. A particular aspect of concern stems from the fact that the transmission of optical signals through a complex optical fiber network is subject to the occurrence of reflections in the multitude of connectors spanning the path between a remote node and a head-end node. Therefore, we will focus our analysis on the performance impact of optical reflections affecting the power level stability of the optical source.

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