Space-division multiplexing (SDM) has attracted significant attention in recent years because larger transmission capacity is enabled by more degrees of freedom (DOFs) in few-mode fibers (FMFs) compared with single-mode fibers (SMFs). To transmit independent information on spatial modes without or with minor digital signal processing (DSP), weakly-coupled FMFs are preferred in various applications. Several cases with different use of spatial DOFs in weakly-coupled FMFs are demonstrated in this work, including single-mode or mode-group-multiplexed transmission, and spatial DOFs combined with time or frequency DOF to improve the system performance.

We propose a passive compensation fiber-optic radio frequency (RF) transfer scheme with a nonsynchronized RF stable source during a round-trip time, which can avoid high-precision phase-locking and efficiently suppress the effect of backscattering only using two wavelengths at the same time. A stable frequency signal is directly reproduced by frequency mixing at the remote site. The proposed scheme is validated by the experiment over a 40 km single mode fiber spool using nonsynchronized common commercial RF sources. The influence of the stability of nonsynchronized RF sources on the frequency transfer is investigated over different length fiber links.

Compressive sampling (CS) has attracted considerable attention in microwave and radio frequency (RF) fields in recent years. It enables the acquisition of high-frequency signals at a rate much smaller than their Nyquist rates. Combined with photonics technology, traditional CS systems can significantly enlarge their operating bandwidth, which offers great potential for spectrum sensing in cognitive radios. In this Letter, we review our recent work on photonic CS systems for wideband spectrum sensing. First, a proof-of-concept photonics-assisted CS system is demonstrated; it is capable of acquiring numerous radar pulses in an instantaneous bandwidth spanning from 500 MHz to 5 GHz with a 500-MHz analog-to-digital converter (ADC). To further reduce the acquisition bandwidth, multi-channel photonics-assisted CS systems are proposed for the first time, enabling the acquisition of multi-tone signals with frequencies up to 5 GHz by using 120-MHz ADCs. In addition, the system bandwidth is increased from 5 to 20 GHz by employing time-interleaved optical sampling.

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate a full-duplex transmission system of IEEE 802.11ac-compliant multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) signals over a 2-km 7-core fiber for in-building wireless local-area network (WLAN) distributed antenna systems. For full-duplex 3×3 MIMO demonstration, the crosstalk impacts of both fiber-transmission-only and optic-wireless transmission situation are evaluated. The results indicate that the impact of crosstalk on radio-over-fiber (ROF) link performance is not significant and the quality of the cascaded multi-core fiber and wireless channel is mainly determined by the wireless part. To further improve the system capacity, polarization multiplexing (PolMux) technology is employed to achieve a full-duplex 6×6 MIMO over a single 7-core fiber. Although employing the PolMux method will slightly decrease the EVM and condition number performance as opposed to a non-PolMux MCF system, it is still a competitive solution in large optical connection demand scenarios that require a low cost.

Ultra-low phase noise performance is required for frequency agile local oscillators, which are the core for high resolution imagers, spectrum analyzers, and high speed data communications. A forced opto-electronic oscillator (OEO) benefits from frequency stabilization techniques for realizing a clean and low phase noise source at microwave and millimeter wave frequencies. Forced oscillation techniques of self-injection locking and self-phase lock loop are combined to provide an ultra-low oscillator phase noise both close-in and far-away from the carrier frequency, while a tunable yttrium iron garnet microwave filter combined with a wavelength tuned transversal filter are employed to implement both coarse and fine frequency tuning for a tunable X-band OEO. A phase noise of 137 dBc/Hz at an offset frequency of 10 kHz is achieved covering the frequencies of 9 to 11 GHz with a fine frequency tuning resolution of 44 Hz/pm and coarse tuning of 25 MHz/mA. Moreover, the long term stability of the output signal is tested, and a maximum frequency drift of 2 kHz is measured within 60 min for the X-band synthesizer.

The common and traditional method for optical dispersion compensation is concatenating the transmitting optical fiber by a compensating optical fiber having a high-negative dispersion coefficient. In this Letter, we take the opposite direction and show how an optical fiber with a high-positive dispersion coefficient is used for dispersion compensation. Our optical dispersion compensating structure is the optical implementation of an iterative algorithm in signal processing. The proposed dispersion compensating system is constructed by cascading a number of compensating sub-systems, and its compensation capability is improved by increasing the number of embedded sub-systems. We also show that the compensation capability is a trade-off between the transmission length and bandwidth. We use the simulation results to validate the performance of the introduced dispersion compensating module. Photonic crystal fibers with high-positive dispersion coefficients can be used for constructing the proposed optical dispersion compensating module.

A highly linear W-band receiver front-end based on higher-order optical sideband (OSB) processing is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Two-tone analysis shows that by manipulating higher-order OSBs, the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) introduced by optoelectronic components (mainly modulators) in the receiver front-end can be further suppressed, and a 9 dB improvement of the ratio of the fundamental and IMD3 can be attained. In the experiment, the spurious-free dynamic range of the W-band receiver front-end is up to 122.1 dB·Hz2/3, with improvement by 9 dB compared with that of only processing the five OSBs.

We demonstrate flexible multidimensional modulation formats, polarization multiplexed k-symbol check quadrature phase shift keying (PM-kSC-QPSK), based on PM-QPSK constellations for elastic optical networks. The experimental results show a significant optical signal noise ratio (OSNR) tolerance improvement for PM-2SC-QPSK and PM-4SC-QPSK over PM-QPSK in both back-to-back and 500 km transmission scenarios at the expense of spectral efficiency reduction. This flexible modulation method can be used in elastic optical networks to provide a trade-off between the spectral efficiency and OSNR tolerance.

Based on dense wavelength-division multiplexing technology, frequency transfer and time synchronization are simultaneously realized over a compensated cascaded fiber link of 430 km, which is a part of the Beijing–Shanghai optical fiber backbone network. The entire cascaded system consists of two stages with fiber links of 280 and 150 km, respectively. To keep high symmetry and low noise, specific bi-directional erbium-doped fiber amplifiers are used to compensate the large optical attenuation of each fiber link. When the compensation servo is active in every stage, the cascaded system achieves the stability of 1.94×10 13 at 1 s and 1.34×10 16 at 104 s, for frequency transfer. It is also verified that the actual results of the cascaded system are in good agreement with the theoretical ones calculated from error theory. Simultaneously, after calibration of each stage, time synchronization is also realized. The final accuracy of the whole system is within 94 ps.

We demonstrate a new fiber-based radio frequency (RF) dissemination scheme suitable for a star-shaped branching network. Without any phase controls on the RF signals or the use of active feedback-locking components, the highly stable reference frequency signal can be delivered to several remote sites simultaneously and independently. The relative frequency stabilities of 6×10 15/s and 7×10 17/104 s are obtained for a 10 km dissemination. This low cost and scalable method can be applied to a large-scale frequency synchronization network.