Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) is becoming increasingly popular for the transportation of wireless signals due to it having a couple of advantages in the millimeter-wave communication architecture. This paper focuses on bringing a new approach to produce high-frequency signals in the millimeter-wave region for Radio-over-Fiber technology. It also gives information regarding an Opto-Electronics Oscillator (OEO) that has been designed for 3 GHz to produce signals with long-term stability, a high side-mode suppression ratio with a low phase noise and can be a key component for 5G converged networks.

This article presents a solution that needs only one low-phase-noise oscillator for many cellular network base-stations. The proposed approach can provide a solution that is especially suitable for the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) high-capacity radio system based on millimetre-wave (mmW) frequency bands, where the phase noise is one of main limiting parameters. The stable and low-phase-noise signal, which can be generated by an advanced opto-electronic oscillator (OEO), is distributed to remote antenna units over a passive optical network infrastructure by radio-over-fibre (RoF) technology. Besides the cost effectiveness, this solution can decrease the size and complexity of base-stations, the number of which will increase in 5G cellular networks due to a reduction in the cell size. This article also presents the key building block for such a RoF system, which is a high-stability OEO.

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This paper describes and discusses the practical application of an opto-electronic oscillator for the next generation of 5G mobile and wireless networks based on millimeterwave technology. The application of a single-loop, opto-electronic oscillator is designed for 39 GHz and will be implemented in the central-station of an upcoming 5G mobile and wireless network. The aim of this configuration is to decrease the complexity of the base-stations for a next-generation system and provide an economic advantage for upcoming 5G networks. The system is designed to avoid the power penalty due to the chromatic dispersion, is temperature stabilized to have a long-term stability and has a low side-modes effect to ensure a low phase noise.

The opto-electronic oscillator (OEO), used as a high-frequency oscillator to produce millimeter-wave (mm-W) signals with a low phase noise, is a suitable candidate for fifth-generation (5G) networks in the mm-W range. Since a mm-W OEO is too expensive for every 5G base-station, another option is to employ the OEO at the central-office to feed the base-stations via a passive optical network (PON) infrastructure. The lengths of the PON branches introduce a large power penalty to the transmitted mm-W OEO signal due to the chromatic dispersion of the optical fiber. In this paper the idea of upgrading the PON branches with tunable dispersion-compensated modules to have power-penalty-free transmission is proposed. By overcoming the powerpenalty problem in the mm-W range, the integrated optical dispersioncompensated modules are used to minimize the influence of the dispersion in the standard single-mode optical fiber used in the PON.