Analysis of Radio over fiber Systems Performance

after optimizing Delay Interferometers parameters

and Incorporating Low pass Chebyshev filters at the
Receiver
Prof. Sivacoumar R Pranjay Gupta, Sarthak Agrawal
Assistant Professor (SG) Student: Final Year, B.Tech.
School of Electronics Engineering E.C.E
VIT University, Vellore VIT University, Vellore
Tamil Nadu, India Tamil Nadu, India
rsivacoumar@vit.ac.in Pranjay.gupta2012@vit.ac.in, sarthakagrawal1995@gmail.com

Abstract Radio over fiber is generally incorporated to send
data of radio frequency range via fiber optic cable. The main
reason behind using fiber optic cable is its high speed of
transmission, large Bandwidth and less attenuation. In this paper
a modified Radio over Fiber system is proposed by implementing
Low pass Chebyschev filter at the receiver and by optimizing
interferometers parameter. It was found that proposed systems
Q-factor was 47% higher at low bit rates and 124% higher at
high bit rates as compared to previously proposed RoF system[1].
Also, with respect to length of fiber there was significant Q factor
for long optical fiber cables. Moreover, BER was zero till 2.7
Gbps, which increases the feasibility of our system by a huge
extent in comparison to earlier RoF systems [1]. Simulations were
done using optisystem software [2].
that have a huge impact on the performance of ROF System
[8]. In section II we will see the basic functionality of radio
over fiber system and the major design and parametric changes
done by us to get better results. Section III provides
relationship between the bit error rate of source and the Q
factor at the output. In the same section we will see the relation
between threshold and minimum BER with respect to bit rate
of source.
In Section IV we will look at variation of eye height and Q
Factor with respect to bit rate and fiber optic cable length. At
last, The Section V deals with variation in Q factor with respect
to delay by delay interferometer.

Keywords: ROF, BER, Q Factor, Eye height

I. INTRODUCTION
It is indispensable in todays world to have a fast and
reliable communication along with a better quality of service.
The invention of fiber optic cable was revolutionary in the field
of wired and wireless communication. Most of the industries
and corporations have their data transferred over the fiber optic
cables [3][4]. Fiber optic cable plays a crucial role in wireless
communication or any type of communication that involves
modulation over radio frequencies [5]. The reduction in the
transmission speed of wireless communication system is due to
the delay between antennas and the base station. Also if we
consider a mobile communication system, each service i.e.
GSM, CDMA, 3G etc. require separate antennas since speed
for each system is different [6][7]. Presently the most Figure 1. Typical ROF network design.[9]
promising solution for this problem is Fiber based wireless
facilities.
Although, there are a lot of disciplines where an extensive
research is required, this study mainly focusses on performance
aspects of Radio over fiber system by changing the parameters

978-1-4673-9223-5/15/$31.00 2015
c IEEE 462
 II. FUNCTIONING OF ROF
ROF circuitry is mainly divided into 2 major parts:
A. Transmitter section
It consists of Pseudo random code generator followed by NRZ
encoder. Combined output of this is amplitude modulated with
a sinusoidal signal of amplitude 1 a.u. and frequency 10GHz
and 15GHz .Initial bit rate was 1 Gbps.
The two amplitude modulated signal are then combined using
combiner and are sent to two different branches of LiNb-Mach
Zehnder modulator .Input of this modulator is taken from CW
Laser with 0dbm power. LiNb-Mach Zehnder modulator takes
this power combined signal to use its electric field to create a
delay in one of the branch where the CW laser passes [1] .This
is then interfered with original CW laser signal and intensity
modulated wave is produced. This wave is provided to an
optical amplifier with a gain of 20 dB and a noise figure of 4
db. Following this we have optical fiber of initial length 20Km
and attenuation factor of 0.1db/km.
B. Receiver section
This section mainly comprises of a delay line interferometer
which is responsible for splitting light into two parts which are
provided to optical Bessel filter responsible for removing
unwanted noise signals.
Filtered output is then amplified and provided to photo
detector circuit where photodiode has a responsivity of 10A/W.
The analog signal is then passed to a coherent modulator
followed having a cutoff frequency of 2GHz. To flatten the
signal we pass it through a low pass Chebyschev filter and
finally to the regenerator circuit.
Figure 2. Circuit diagram implemented
2015 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology (iCATccT)
III. SIMULATION RESULT AND DISCUSSION
Our results are based mainly on two aspects first one is the eye
diagram and the second is minimum BER.
Eye diagram is pattern formed due to repetitive sampling done
on the input side along with the horizontal sweep due to the bit
rate [5][10]. It is very much helpful in checking Intersymbol
interference [11].
Bit error rate in optical communication system refers to the
amount of error in the bit we get in particular interval of time
as we can see in figure 5
So to have a lucid observation we divided this section in two
parts where first deals with varying Bit rate and other with
varying fiber optic cable length.
Lastly we varied delay of delay interferometer and observed
the variation in Q factor.
1. Varying NRZ coding parameter i.e. Bit rate
In this section we will discuss about the effect of NRZ
parameter on various eye pattern parameters. There is a steep
increase in minimum bit error rate after the bit rate crosses 2.8
Gbps i.e. the ratio of total number of bits and the number of
bits sent is minimum [12] . The main reason behind this is
problem in bit synchronization at the receiver and the inter
symbol interference caused due to large number of bits in
small duration of time.
This is evident from figure 3 which suggests that as we
increase the bit rate the Q factor will decrease, which is also
because of inter symbol interference.
Figure 3. Eye Diagram Pattern for 10 Ghz signal.
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 Figure 6(a). Relationship between Q factor and Giga bits transmitted per
second for 10GHz signal.

Figure 4. Bit error rate and Q factor for given ROF network.

Table 1: Parameters for the components

S. Component and parameter Value
No.
1. Source frequency 15GHz and 10GHz
2. Fiber length 20Km
3. Fiber attenuation Factor 0.1db/km
4. Amplitude Modulator Cutoff 2GHz
Frequency Figure 6(b). Comparison between Q factor of proposed and previous Rof
System[1].
5. Optical Amplifier Gain 15db
6. Optical Amplifier Noise Figure 5db Here we can see that maximum Q factor achievable is 25
7. Pre amplifier gain 20db which occurs at a bit rate of 1Gbps. The main thing about our
setup is that we were able to get a significant Q factor even at
the Bit Rate of 3.7Gbps which is higher than suggested by
Jincy Johnny et.al. [1]. Also the rate of change of Q factor
with respect to bits transmitted is not rapid after 1.25Gbps.
According to the expression given by Vishal et. al. [13]
Q2
2
1 e
BER = . (1)
2 Q

There is an inverse relationship between BER and Q factor as

evident from figure 5 and 6 i.e. as we increase bit rate the BER
increases and the Q factor decreases.
Now we shall see how the Eye height is affected by increase
in bit rate (figure 7).
Figure 5. Plot between Min. BER and Bit Rate for 10GHz signal

464 2015 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology (iCATccT)

Figure 7. Plot between eye height and Bit Rate(Gbps) for 10GHz signal
We see that the output is as expected but the magnitude for
eye height has increased in comparison to Jincy John[1]
discussion. The main reason behind this is the use of an
optical amplifier at the transmitter side . Also we can see that
eye height is extended till 3.3 Gbps which is also a figure of
merit as we were able to avoid inter symbol interference for a
larger range of bit rates.
Next we see in figure 8 that threshold first decreases till 1.3
Gbps then rises till 1.9 Gbps and becomes somewhat constant
signifying the fact that corresponding to minimum threshold,
eye height would be maximum. Also there is a significant
threshold at a bit rate of 3.5 Gbps.
Figure 8. Threshold versus bit rate(Gbps) fo 10 GHz signal
2. Varying Fiber length
Length of the fiber plays an important role in deciding the Q
factor of the Rof network. In our experiment we have used a
unidirectional fiber optic cable of initial length 20Km. As we
increase the length of the fiber the polarization mode
dispersion increases leading to decrease in Q factor of the
system. Along with this we have kept the attenuation factor of
our fiber to be 0.1db/Km.
The main inference that can be drawn from the given graph is
that whenever the length of fiber was made in multiple of
20Km we were getting nonlinear abruption in Q factor values
whereas for other regions it was linear. Also our observations
are supported by work done by Warren Koontz et.al. [14]. But
in all previous observations there is a gradual decrease in the
Q factor whereas in our study we found that when fiber length
2015 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology (iCATccT)
reaches 100Km the Q factor rises again instead of becoming
zero.
In Figure 10 we can see that there is a huge drop in eye height
as we increase the length of fiber from 20 km to 40 km which
is constant afterwards.
Figure 9. Q factor vs length of the fiber for 10 GHz signal
Figure 10. Eye Height vs length of the fiber(Kms) for 10 GHz signal
3. Delay of Delay interferometer
Delay interferometer is a device that is use to convert the
phase shifted signal created by Mach Zehnder Modulator to its
original phase so that it can be demodulated to get back the
Radio frequency signals that were transmitted. Here we will
vary the value of delay that is provided by the delay
interferometer and check the output Q factor. It was expected
that there should be a deterioration in the value of Q factor as
we increase the delay since more the delay would be there
more are the chances of getting an out of phase signal but in
our study we found that after certain instant of delay Q factor
stopped decreasing and became constant . The reason behind
this is when there is destructive interference between the two
laser waves (delayed and non-delayed) than the noise present
in the channel will lead to a significant Q factor.
From figure 11 we can observe the similar results.
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One more observation that we made was that when the
received signal was regenerated there was a time delay of 2
Nano second as can be seen in figure 12.
Figure 11. Q factor vs delay of dela interferometer for 10 GHz signal
Figure 12. Delayed receivved signnal
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper we modified the earlier RoF system by
introducing filters at the receiver and optimizing parameters
involved to obtain better Q factor corresponding to varying bit
rates and fiber optic cable length. Also we observed the
dependency of minimum BER on bit rate. Regarding eye
height we found that there is no such uniform relation between
eye height and bit rate but while length of the fiber optic cable
is considered the eye height reduces drastically and becomes
constant. Finally we saw direct relation between Q factor and
delay of delay interferometer.
466 2015 International Conference on Applied and Theoretical Computing and Communication Technology (iCATccT)
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