Optical Fiber Link Radio Expansion System for Weak Reception Area

Yoji Okada' Noriyuki Hirakata' Akihiro Kamemural Tamao Saito' Yuichi Masuda' Yuzo Koshino3

1 Systems & Electronics R & D Center, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.

1-3, 1-chome, Shimaya, Konohana-ku, Osaka, 554 JAPAN
2 Radio & Optical Wave Systems Division, Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd.
1-3, 1-chome, Shimaya, Konohana-ku, Osaka, 554 JAPAN
3 First Engineering Dept., Kansai Cellular Telephone Co., Ltd.
4-12, 2-chome, Nakazaki-nishi, Kitaku, Osaka, 530 JAPAN

Abstract - In the design of Optical Fiber Link Radio noise, and most analog LDs have been developed mainly
Expansion System, we have t o consider two important for CATV use (- 550MHz).
points. One is the dynamic range defined by carrier-to- To overcome this problem, we decided to convert RF
noise ratio and intermodulation distortion. The other is signal into intermediate frequency (IF) signal before the
the cost of a laser diode. To cope with these problems, optical transmission so that a less expensive LD could be
we use frequency conversion technique, because we can used. In the future, this frequency conversion technique
select one of many analog laser diodes developed mainly will allow us to transmit several different band services
for CATV use. Besides, the total system in the future will simultaneously (e.g. radio systems for disaster preven-
becomes flexible since it will allow us to transmit several tion, police, and future milliwave mobile communication
different band services simultaneously with low frequency service) with low frequency LDs by rearranging their fre-
LDs by rearranging their frequency bands. quency bands.
In this paper, we describe certain points in design-
ing this analog transmission fiber optic link using a fre-
1. Introduction
quency conversion technique through experimental re-
Cellular mobile communication services have come sults. Practical application results are also revealed.
into nation-wide use. Analog and digital cellular mo-
bile telephones are more popular than ever, and the ser-
vice areas are continually expanding. Unfortunately the MS Repeater
number of weak reception areas, such as the inside of
buildings or tunnels, underground shopping zones, and
obstruction of tall buildings, have also increased, urging
telecommunication companies to search for an immedi-
ate solution.
Telecommunication companies have been dealing
with weak reception areas by laying leakage coaxial ca-
bles or creating new base stations. However, extremely
limited space for the equipment, and engineering them
consumes considerable time and money.
As a solution to this problem, analog transmission \
fiber optic links recently have come into focus [2, 3, 41. b
They offer not only low transmission loss and engineering
simplicity but also low cost and small size, because they
need no complicated facility, for instance, a line control Figure 1: Optical fiber link radio expansion system.
switch or modulator / demodulator.
We have to consider two important points in de-
signing this analog transmission fiber optic link. One 2. Outline of Optical Fiber Link Radio Expan-
is a "trade-off" between the carrier-to-noise ratio ( C / N ) sion System
and the intermodulation distortion ( I M D ) [2, 41, and the
other is the cost of a laser diode (LD). It is difficult for 2.1 System Overview
one to find an appropriate LD for transmitting the radio
frequency(RF) signal as it is, and if any, it is likely to be The system, called Optical Fiber Link Radio Expan-
expensive, since specifications required for an LD in ana- sion System, is specifically designed to back up or even
log transmission applications are critical compared with extend the original communication coverage. As shown
those in digital applications especially for linearity and in Fig. 1, the system consists of four components: an

0-7803-2955-4/95/$4.00 OIEEE

501
 BS Reoeater MS ReDeater MS Antenna

Table 1: Required Specifications

1 Intermodulation Distortions I < -6OdBc I
I Frequency Stability I < 0.05 m m I

Q.i:iU.ator--I I flikx _I
antenna and a repeater toward the base station (BS an- Ref. : Reference Signal
tenna and BS repeater) and those toward mobile stations
(MS antenna and MS repeater). When the BS repeater Figure 2: Block diagram of down link unit.
is directly connected to the base station, as in type 2, a
BS antenna is not necessary.
nal to the PLL oscillators exists only in the BS repeater,
BS antenna and MS antenna are installed to face the
and the reference signal for MS repeater is transmitted
base station and the weak reception area, respectively;
via an optical fiber. In this way, the reference signal is
each position is such that it can receive sufficient radio
shared by both the repeaters. Under the control of the
signals from the base station or mobile stations.
same reference signal, the two repeaters can achieve pre-
In down-link, a BS antenna receives the radio signal
cise agreement on the local oscillation frequency of their
from the base station. the BS repeater converts the elec-
trical signal into optical signals and transmits it to a MS
PLL circuits.
Three technical points deserve special notice in these
repeater via an optical fiber. The MS repeater converts
the optical signal into the electrical signal again. The circuits.
MS antenna delivers the radio signal t o mobile stations First is the selection of the IF band. The IF band
and the local frequency should be determined so that
in the weak reception area. In up-link, the signal flows
second-order IMD produced by any pair of I F band sig-
in the opposite way.
nals will not appear within the band, because they are
Table 1 shows the required specifications of the Op-
hardly removed with a filter.
tical Fiber Link Radio Expansion System. These values
Second is the choice of the reference signal frequency
are based on the standard RCR STD-27B [5],which orig-
for the PLL circuits, which we selected as 15.36MHz1so
inally applies to base stations in Personal Digital Cellular
that:
(PDC) system.
1. The harmonic distortions of the reference signal will
2.2 Frequency Conversion Technique not interfere with the I F signal.
In our system, the RF signal is down-converted into 2. The separation of the I F signal and the reference
IF signal by a mixer and a local oscillator in the re- signal is easy.
peater. After the optical transmission, the IF signal is
up-converted to the original RF signal by those in the Third is the transmission level of the reference sig-
other repeater at the other end of the optical fiber. In nal in the optical fiber. This is because the LD in the
this case, if a frequency difference exists between the two BS repeater causes second-order IMD from the reference
local oscillators, the R F signal cannot be reproduced as signal and the I F signal. To avoid this distortion, the
before. transmission level of the reference signal must be kept
As mentioned above, the frequency stability must low, as explained later.
be less than 0.05ppm for base stations, however, this
value is difficult to achieve even when crystal oscilla- 3. System Design
tors, which are generally accepted to have high frequency
accuracy, are used as independent local oscillators for In this section, we describe and discuss the points
down-conversion and up-conversion. In fact, crystal os- in designing the actual system.
cillators can usually offer frequency accuracy of several
ppm at best. Keeping both the frequencies same pre-
3.1 Noise Characteristics
cisely is even more difficult due to the fact that the two
oscillators are likely to operate a t different temperatures, It is well known that C / N in optical transmission is
and other surrounding conditions, because they are sep- represented as follows [l,2, 41:
arated geographically from each other.
To solve this difficulty, we developed a new arrange-
ment, illustrated in Fig. 2.
The BS repeater and MS repeater house local oscil-
lators respectively, which form phase-locked loops (PLL). where m is optical modulation index, I = QP,. is re-
The crystal oscillator which generates the reference sig- ceived dc photo current, v is photodiode sensitivity, p,.

502
 I I I I I

-50- 0 HPA c
Table 2: Parameters
Relative intensity noise
Received optical Dower
. RIN
P,
I
I
-145 [dBc/Hz]
+2 ldBml
-$ -60-
0 Fiber Optic Link 0

I Photodiode
~ sensitivitv
~.~
_. ..
. n I 0.8 I 0 . 0
0 0
\
m -70- a Gain40dB 1
Charge of an electron r - 0 I O
Boltzmann constant I O
Temperature -80- $measured / Bamplifiei
Noise bandwidth B 25 FHz] I 1 I I / I I

Noise figure of the LNA F -20 0 20 0

Gain from the input of LNA Output Level[dBm]
to the output of PD G 20[dB]
Figure 3: 2-tone type 3rd order IMD.

is received optical power, R I N is the sum of relative in- is the third-order IMD among the I F signals. The other
tensity noise of LD and optical reflection, < I& > is is the second-order IMD from IF signals and the refer-
thermal noise current variance for optical receiver, B is ence signal for the PLLs, which is a particular problem
noise bandwidth per channel, and e is charge of an elec- in the frequency conversion technique.
tron.
Though this equation is often used in evaluating 9.2.1 Thard-order Intermodulation Distortaon
characteristics of the optical part, it is not always suit-
In the Optical Fiber Link Radio Expansion System,
able for designing the total system. If a low noise ampli-
an LD and a high power amplifier (HPA), which are
fier (LNA) is connected before a LD, the noise amplified
shown in Fig. 2, mainly cause the third-order IMD. Fig-
by the LNA may be dominant a t the output of the opti-
ure 3 illustrates an example of the twetone type third-
cal receiver. We now consider the case as in Table 2 .
order I M D characteristics of the LD and the HPA.
At the output of the optical receiver, the noise cur-
Here it should be noted that the HPA amplifies not
rent variance amplified by the LNA is a t least:
only the signals but also the distortions by the LD. These
4bTBGF distortions should be designed to be lower than the in-
< Ii2, > 2,
trinsic distortion by the HPA, because the HPA’s lin-
RL
N 1.27 x 10-15[A2]. earity limits the maximum output power from the an-
tenna of the Optical Fiber Link Radio Expansion Sys-
The noise-current variance which the optical part tem, which is strongly demanded in actual use.
generates is: In Fig. 3, if the gain from the output of O/E (opti-
cal electrical) conversion through the output of HPA is
4kTB more than 40dB, the distortions by the LD are almost
< I:pt> = RIN.12-B+2-e.I.B+-
RL negligible. In this case, we are able to concentrate upon
= 1.27 x 1 0 - l ~+ 1.01x io-’’ MPA’s performance.
+8.00 x 10-18[A2]
= 1.45 x 10-16[A2] 3.2.2 Second-order Intermodulation Distortaon

where the first term represents the sum of intensity noise
of LD and optical reflection, the second term is shot
noise, and the last term is thermal noise.
As shown above, the noise amplified by the LNA
is dominant at the output of the optical receiver. In
other words, the theory of the noise figure may handle
the system including the optical transmission: If the first
LNA has a sufficient gain, the C / N characteristics of the
Optical Fiber Link Radio Expansion System depend only
on the noise figure of the LNA.
Consequently, in the development of our system, we
valued IMD characteristics of the LD above its R I N .
9.2 Intermodulation Distortion Characteristics
We considered two types of I M D in the optical trans-
mission, which exist inside the transmission band. One
Second-order IMD occur a t the sum and difference
of two signal frequencies. In case the bandwidth of the
IF signal is broader than the reference signal frequency,
the second-order IhfD appears within the IF signal band,
and is difficult to removed. This occurs in our system,
where the reference signal frequency is 15.36MHe.
To suppress the distortion, the transmission level of
the reference signal must be kept sufficiently low. How-
ever this causes poorer phase noise characteristics in the
local oscillation signals because the C / N of the reference
signal degrades, especially after the optical transmission.
Hence we must find appropriate transmission level of the
reference signal.
Fig. 4 shows the measured results of the second-
order IMD vs. the reference signal level in the optical
part. The reason why the characteristics of the HPA
are not plotted is that no second-order IMD by the HPA

503
 -./
RL
r- .
-io.odam
--U03
IOEIB,' LN
iP,, . C . - Y U T l
ZMPIZ
I I I~
' ' ' 1 1 1 ' ' ' 1 ' a* -

-o
-60 - - - - - - _-
-The Input Signal Level
--- -
- - - --------eo-
a
% - -34[dBm] 'a D

Y
cu - .em s

r - 0
b
0

-70-
0..
0
I I ..I I I I I I I I I I I I

START OHZ sroP z o o OMHZ

Figure 4: 2nd order IMD of the optical part. *Raw 300kHz * V R W SokHz * s W P 50sec

(a) Without optlcal rsolator

will appear within the transmission band theoretically, ArTEw i O d B MKR -44. SOtiEm
RL -3.0.0dBm 1OdB/ 14 7MHz
for the reference signal is removed by a filter before the
input of the HPA.
From this figure, we can see, in order to meet the
requirement for IMD, we should keep the transmission D
5
level of the reference signal less than -42 dBm. In our
system we set the level for -55 dBm after examining
whether the phase noise characteristics in the local oscil-
lation signal show remarkable degradation.

3.3 Influence of Optacal Reflectaon

START O H 2 STOP 200.OMHz
It is well known that optical reflection from fiber +RBW JOOKHZ % V S W 3 0 k H z H S W P 508ec

discontinuities (e.g. fiber connectors / splices and photo (b) With optical isolator
diode (PD) surface) back into the laser cavity degrades
the system quality [l, 41. Here we introduce two mea- Figure 6: The signal after O/E conversion.
surements by a setup illustrated in Fig. 5 .
Figure 6 (a) and (b) show the reference signal with
and without the external optical isolator, respectively,
measured at (: after O/E conversion) in Fig .5. Many
sprious noises are detected around the reference signal
without the isolator.
Figure 7 shows the phase noise characteristics of the
local oscillation signals at Q in Fig. 5. When the iso-
lator is inserted just after the LD, the phase noise is
suppressed.
These results suggest that this phase noise degra- (a) Without optical wolator
dation is caused by the optical reflection, that is, the
corrupted reference signal by these sprious noises. Be-
cause there is no sprious noise above 100MHz, this is a
problem peculiar t o the frequency conversion technique
which requires the transmission of the low frequency ref-
erence signal.

Optical Output +7dBm

(b) With optical isolator

Figure 5: Measurement setup for Fig.6 and Fig.7. Figure 7: Phase noise in local oscillation signals.

504
 H.Mizuguchi, T.Okuno, S.Komaki, N.Morinaga,
”Performance Analysis of Optical Fiber Link for
Microcellular Mobile Communication Systems,” IE-
’ Frequency band 8 4 3 4 4 6 , 8 6 0 ~ 8 7 0[MHz] (down)
’ 8 9 8 ~ 9 0 1915-925
, [MHz] (up) ICE Trans. Electron., Vol.E76-C, pp.271-278, 1993.
RF output power 1 [mW/carrier] (max.)
No. of transmission ch 30 lchl H .Ogawa, ” Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Fiber
Optical transmission 196 [A] (BlF)
U
Optic Technologies for Subcarrier Transmission
distance 240 [m] (B2F) Systems,” IEICE Trans. Commun., Vol.E76-B,
. Size BS repeater 400(W)~300(D)~1100(H [mm]
) pp .1078- 1089, 1993.
- MS repeater 400(W) x300(D)x900(H) [mm]
MShibutani, W.Domon, K,Emura, ”Reflection In-
duced Degradations in Optical Fiber Feeder for Mi-
crocellular Mobile Radio Systems,” IEICE Trans.
4. Actual Example Electron., Vol.E76-C, pp.287-292, 1993.
In this section, we will introduce two examples of Research & Development Center for Radio System,
the Optical Fiber Link Radio Expansion System. One is ”Digital Cellular Telecommunication System RCR
that installed in one building in Osaka. Standard RCR STD-27B7” 1992.
Figure 8 shows a conceptual view of this. The two
underground parking levels constitute a weak reception
area. The BS antenna is set up on the 13th floor of the
building which provides adequate field strength. The MS I
Base Station
antennas are placed in locations as shown in Fig. 9.

@ -In Fig. 9, electric field strengths are indicated in

@. Since the electric field strength was at most
30dBpV/m before the installation of the system, this
: Service Area
I

measured data evidences the effectiveness of this system

to compensate weak reception area.
Table 3 summarizes the specifications of the devel- MS Repeater
oped system. Underground -1
The other example is for aboveground use, which re- Parking lot
quires wider coverage area and more transmission chan- B1F

nels than underground. In this case, we achieved 4km

optical transmission and 20mW/carrier x 30 carrier RF
output power, and carried the system into service.

5 . Conclusion Figure 8: Outline of actual system.

We have developed the Optical Fiber Link Radio
Expansion System which enables subscribers to use cellu-
lar phones in weak reception areas. We have introduced
certain points in designing this analog transmission fiber
optic link using a frequency conversion technique and
examples which have been put into actual service.

Acknowledgement
The authors are most grateful to the engineers of
Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. and Kansai Cellular
Telephone Co., Ltd. for their very generous cooperation. t 307 8m h a In6 b . u m n l plan

Figure 9: Result of electric field strength in underground

Reference parking lot.
1. W.I.Way, ”Subcarrier Multiplexed Lightwave Sys-
tem Design Consideration For Subscriber Loop Ap-
plications,” IEEE J . Lightwave Technol., vo1.7,
pp. 1806-1818, 1989.

505