26.8-m THz wireless transmission of probabilistic shaping 16-QAM-OFDM signals

Abstract

Recently, remarkable efforts have been made in developing wireless communication systems at ultrahigh data rates, with radio frequency (RF) carriers in the millimeter wave (30–300 GHz) and/or in the terahertz (THz, >300 GHz) bands. Converged technologies combining both the electronics and the photonics show great potential to provide feasible solutions with superior performance compared to conventional RF technologies. However, technical challenges remain to be overcome in order to support high data rates with considerably feasible wireless distances for practical applications, particularly in the THz region. In this work, we present an experimental demonstration of a single-channel THz radio-over-fiber (RoF) system operating at 350 GHz, achieving beyond 100 Gbit/s data rate over a 10-km fiber plus a >20-m wireless link, without using any THz amplifiers. This achievement is enabled by using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signal with a probabilistic-shaped 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation format, a pair of highly directive Cassegrain antennas, and advanced digital signal processing techniques. This work pushes the THz RoF technology one step closer to ultrahigh-speed indoor wireless applications and serves as an essential segment of the converged fiber-wireless access networks in the beyond 5G era.