Digital mobile fronthaul scheme based on diff-delta–sigma modulation and OCT precoding

Abstract

In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate digital mobile fronthaul (MFH) for 65536 quadrature amplitude modulation (65536-QAM) signals based on a diff-delta–sigma modulation (D-DSM) scheme with orthogonal circulant matrix transform (OCT) precoding. By combining the D-DSM scheme with OCT precoding, we successfully solved the problem of uneven distribution of in-band quantization noise (IBN) while bringing about a quantization SNR gain of about 1.5 dB. In addition, we compare two signal combination schemes, Gray coding and power superposition, in the D-DSM scheme. The results show that the power superposition scheme can achieve similar performance to Gray coding with lower computational complexity. At the same time, the power superposition scheme is less affected by the saturation effect. Therefore, the D-DSM solution combined with OCT precoding and power superposition provides an effective solution for future 6 G digital mobile fronthaul.