Author : Balinder Singh and Davender Singh

Radio over Fiber (RoF) system is defined as the technique to modulate the light by the Radio Frequency (RF) Signal and to transmit it over the optical fiber. But, RoF system becomes unfeasible if there is no way to deal with dispersion and nonlinear effects predominantly available in optical communication system. The use of Mach-Zehnder External Modulator, either Single Arm Mach-Zehnder Modulator (SAMZM) or Dual Arm Mach-Zehnder Modulator (DAMZM) is one of the solutions to efficiently design RoF system. This work focuses on the simulation comparison of external modulation using SAMZM and DAMZM in RoF system. After modulation, the signal is transmitted through the Standard Single Mode Fiber (SSMF) without dispersion compensation. The Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) has been used to compensate the inline losses. The system performance is evaluated in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER), Q-Factor and Eye Diagram. The optical systems have been designed using Optsim, which is one of the most powerful optical simulation tools. The graphs have been plotted using Matlab software. All the reported results up to the distance of 50 km have shown that the RoF system using SAMZM is excellent as compared to the system using DAMZM.

Keywords: RoF system, External modulation, SAMZM, DAMZM, EDFA, Eye Diagram, BER and Q-Factor

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.3 (June- 2014)