Mobile fronthaul solution based on visible light fiber communication and zero-padding 8-D CAP modulation

Abstract

With the deployment of the fifth-generation (5 G) emerging technologies, such as massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO), conventional mobile fronthaul (FH) schemes based on Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) are limited in their abilities to support ultra-high data rate, large bandwidth and massive connectivity. This has led to a growing demand for alternative solutions that can better fulfill these requirements. Visible light communication (VLC) has recently gained increasing research interest as a potential complementary technology for beyond-5 G communication, offering advantages such as unlicensed and abundant spectrum, high bandwidth and cost-efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel mobile fronthaul solution based on visible light fiber communication (VLFC), incorporating innovative zero-padding N-D (N>2) carrierless amplitude and phase (CAP) modulation. To avoid strong low-frequency noise (LFN) in the practical VLFC system, we innovatively propose zero-padding N-D CAP based on the actual distribution of LFN for the first time. In contrast to frequency division multiplexing (FDM), N-D CAP eliminates guard bands and ensures similar performance among multiple channels. To prove the concept, we demonstrate the transmission of PAM8 symbols at three typical visible light wavelengths (R/G/B) over 100 m multi-mode fiber (MMF) using zero-padding 8-D CAP modulation. The experiment verifies that zero-padding significantly enhances communication performance, with all 8 channels achieving similar BER. Communication performance improves as wavelengths are longer due to attenuation and dispersion caused by MMF. Finally, we have achieved a total data rate of 10.8Gbps at 635 nm (red), 9.0Gbps at 520 nm (green), and 7.5Gbps at 488 nm (blue) under the 7% HD-FEC threshold.