Abstract

Abstract
Digital Predistortion for Broadband Radio-over-Fiber Transmission Systems
Zichen Xuan
Concordia University 2015
With the increase of the demand of high capacity wireless access, design of cost effective broadband wireless signal distribution system is required, particularly for future massive multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) wireless. Recently, Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) transmission systems have been revisited for broadband wireless signal distribution between central processing unit (CPU) and remote radio unit (RRU) (i.e., antenna towers). RoF, which is based on optical subcarrier modulation and thus an analog transmission system, fully utilize the advantages of broadband and low-loss fiber transmission, and also radio signal transmission.
Unfortunately, RoF transmission systems are very susceptible to nonlinear distortions, which can be generated by all inline functional components of the RoF systems. However, two typical functions, i.e., optical subcarrier modulation and RF power amplification, are the two key sources of the nonlinear distortions. Various linearization techniques have been investigated for power RF amplifiers. It has been found that digital predistortion (DPD) linearization is one of the best approaches for RF bandwidth of up to 20 MHz.
In this thesis, DPD linearization is explored for broadband RoF transmission systems. Instead of DPD implemented in baseband previously, a DPD linearization technique implemented in RF domain is investigated and demonstrated experimentally for broadband RoF transmission systems. Memory polynomial (MP) model is used for theoretical modeling of nonlinear RoF transmission systems, in which both nonlinear distortion and memory effect can be included. In order to implement the predistorter of the DPD using the MP model, least square (LS) method is used to extract the coefficients of the predistorter. Using the obtained coefficients, the trained predistorter is implemented and then verified in two experiments of directly modulated RoF transmission systems. In the first experiment, the DPD is verified in WiFi over fiber transmission systems, and more than 8 dB and 5.6 dB improvements of error vector magnitude (EVM) are achieved in back to back (BTB) and after 10 km single mode fiber (SMF) transmission. In the second experiment, both WiFi and ultra wide band (UWB) wireless signals are transmitted in the RoF system, which occupies over 2.4 GHz transmission bandwidth. It is shown that the implemented DPD leads to EVM improvements of 4.5 dB (BTB) and 3.1 dB (10 km SMF) for the WiFi signal, and 4.6 dB (BTB) and 4 dB (10 km SMF) for the UWB signal.