Low-Latency Synchronous Clock Distribution and Recovery for High-Speed OFMDA-Based Mobile Backhaul

摘要

A communication system includes an OFDMA transmitter (Tx) at an optical line terminal (OLT) generating an OFDMA signal by assigning orthogonal subcarriers to different cell sites through digital logic, an electrical multiplexer combining the electrical OFDMA signal with two electrical clock signals, and an optical intensity modulator intensity-modulating the resulting joint electrical OFDMA+clocks signal; an optical multiplexer receiving aggregate OFDMA signals on multiple wavelengths with tight DWDM λ-spacing; a remote node (RN) receiving the OFDMA signals, such that each wavelength is distributed by a de-multiplexer (Demux) to designated general small cell area, to which cell sites are connected by optical splitters; and an optical network unit (ONU) to directly photodetect and digitize received OFDMA signal, wherein downstream (DS) information for each cell is digitally extracted and prepared for wireless radio frequency (RF) transmission over an air interface, and an electrical splitter and bandpass filters to separate the OFDMA and clock signals for DSP-free clock recovery.