In this paper it is proposed and designed an alloptical Sampler (o-Sampler) intended to be part of future optical Digitising Radio-over-Fibre (o-DRoF) transceivers. It is based on the Semiconductor Laser Amplifier Loop Mirror (SLALOM) configuration thus using the nonlinearities of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in cross-switching regime. The proof-ofprinciple is established by computer simulations using 500 MHz analogue signal and 2.5 GS/s sampling pulses both in the C-band. The proposed o-Sampler outputs real-time generated optical samples from an analogue RoF signal. The simulated device is rather compact, polarisation independent, potentially optically integrable and requires few mW of sampling peak power.

A photonic circuit design for implementing frequency 8-tupling and 24-tupling is proposed. The front- and back-end of the circuit comprises 4×4 MMI couplers enclosing an array of four pairs of phase modulators and 2×2 MMI couplers. The proposed design for frequency multiplication requires no optical or electrical filters, the operation is not limited to carefully adjusted modulation indexes, and the drift originated from static DC bias is mitigated by making use of the intrinsic phase relations of multi-mode interference couplers. A transfer matrix approach is used to represent the main building blocks of the design and hence to describe the operation of the frequency 8-tupling and 24-tupling. The concept is theoretically developed and demonstrated by simulations. Ideal and imperfect power imbalances in the multi-mode interference couplers, as well as ideal and imperfect phases of the electric drives to the phase modulators, are analyzed.

A novel electro-optical up-conversion mixer architecture comprising four electro-optical phase modulators situated in the arms between an interconnected 1 × 4 distribution tree and a complementary 4 × 2 combination tree is proposed. The distribution and combination trees are based on multi-mode interference couplers (MMI). The novelty lies in the use of the intrinsic phase relations between the MMI ports to realize a broadband and free of drift design requiring no static phase shift elements. A transfer-matrix approach is followed to represent the main building blocks in the proposed design, and hence to describe the operation of the entire optical up-conversion mixer. The concept is demonstrated by computer simulations. A single side-band modulation with carrier suppression is obtained at the output of the proposed architecture, which is in agreement with the analytical development. Scenarios considering both ideal and imperfect power balances and phase relations in the MMIs, as well as imperfect phase relations of the electrical drives to the phase modulators are analyzed.

In this paper it is proposed and designed an original all-optical Encoder (o-Encoder) intended, but not exclusively, to be part of future optical digitising radio-over-fibre (o-DRoF) transceiver. It is based on the Semiconductor Laser Amplifier Loop Mirror (SLALOM) configuration exploiting the nonlinearities of a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) in cross-switching regime. The proof-of-principle is established using 40-ps RZ control pulses at 2.5 GHz in the C-band. It outputs serially encoded, quantized and amplified optical RZ bits. Computer simulations of the proposed o-Encoder have shown promising results. The proposed device is rather compact, potentially optically integrable and requires much less input optical power (by several orders of magnitude) than other photonic-encoders and can also naturally convert wavelengths in the optical domain.

Distributed antenna systems (DAS) are known to improve coverage and performance of wireless communicat ions in indoor environ ments. In the present paper, we propose a method to determine the position of distributed antennas that optimizes the network capacity for a given deployment scenario. We also consider power consumption measurements of commercially-available W i-Fi access points and dongles, in order to quantify the energy efficiency of a DAS using Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technologies. Our results show that there exists an optimal nu mber of distributed antennas for a given topology of the indoor environment.