According to an estimate by the Global Technology, Media and Telecom (GTMT) team, global mobile data traffic grew 70% in 2012, which was nearly 12 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000. In the future, the amount of data traffic will grow at a pace never seen before. Many recent forecasts project mobile data traffic to grow more than 24 between 2010 and 2015, and much higher beyond 2015. To catch up with the need and to remain competitive, network operators need to increase the broadband capability of their networks fast. This poses a big challenge for wireless communication system designers. Researchers have been working on innovative systems that will provide several Gbit/s over the air interface.
	
	Digitized radio over fiber (DROF) offers the capability to support various current and future wireless standards, independent of wireless system specifics if the carrier frequency falls within the passband of the ROF link. For example, the same ROF links should be able to transmit either time-division multiple access (TDMA), code-division multiple access (CDMA), or orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) radio signals without modification if their carrier frequencies are the same. Properly designed, the ROF link can also carry multiple RF carriers simultaneously in a subcarrier-multiplexing manner and support multi-standard radio. If the ROF link is properly designed, the portable device should be unaware of the existence of fiber in its radio path. Essentially, radio over fiber (ROF) is an analog communications system, and with DROF, the signal it carries is digital.
	
	Since nonlinear distortions, limited dynamic range, and cumulating noise are major concerns with the analog ROF backbone; alternative approaches are also investigated by researchers. One approach is to transmit a digitized RF signal over fiber from the base station to the radio access point. The falling cost of high-speed digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and analog-to-digital converter (ADC) converters has led to heightened recent interest in digitized radio over fiber links (DROF). In DROF, the I and Q baseband digital signals immediately after the digital signal processor are converted to optical and transported via the fiber. This means that the remote radio heads can be relatively simple too, consisting of DAC converters, up-converters, and amplifiers in the downlink direction and ADC converters, down-converters, and amplifiers in the uplink direction. Signal processing and modulation functions will take place in the central base station (CBS). Therefore, this architecture also satisfies the requirement that the RAP remains small and relatively simple. Such digital links are uses for current wireless systems (UMTS, WiMAX, and LTE) to connect digital base stations to remote radio heads.
	
	In order to use optical fiber to deliver radio signal to remote antennas, methods include the use of an intensity modulator to introduce an RF subcarrier onto the intensity of a CW laser source. This method cannot be extended to millimetre waves due to the limited bandwidth of available modulators. A novel transmitter architecture for the generation and distribution of GHz RF signals is described in this work. One of the principal objectives of this Master Thesis is to present the development of a digitized radio over fiber optical transmission systems under advanced modulation formats. We analyze the impact of chromatic dispersion and nonlinear microwave devices distortions considering one optical subcarrier carrying multiple RF signals.