System Wide Implementation of Photonically Generated Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband for Gigabit Fiber-Wireless Access

In this paper, we comprehensively review our research work on system wide implementation of photonically generated IR-UWB signals based on relaxation oscillations of a semiconductor laser. Firstly, we present our novel approach as a flexible method for photonic generation of high speed impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) signals at 781.25 Mbps with on-off keying (OOK) and binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation formats. We further advance the state-of-the-art to include multi-Gigabit IR-UWB signal generation. Both OOK and BPSK signals comply with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation. Secondly, we implement UWB fiber transmission systems and study hybrid fiber-wireless transmission performance at a system level. This is accomplished by employing our digital signal processing (DSP) assisted receiver. The photonic generation method is superior to the state-of-the-art electronic generation method in terms of transmission bit-error rate performance. Moreover, photonic IR-UWB generation is shown to be capable of longer wireless reach due to its lower bandwidth limitation. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate the integration of a relaxation oscillations-based UWB photonic generation system into existing wavelength division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM-PON) infrastructure. This provides converged Gigabit indoor wireless and wireline access services.