High spectral efficient W-band OFDM-RoF system with direct-detection by two cascaded single-drive MZMs.

W-band wireless transmission has attracted a lot of interest due to its wider available bandwidth (i.e. 75-110 GHz). In this article, we propose a direct-detection orthogonal frequency division multiplexing radio over fiber (OFDM-RoF) system via two cascaded single-drive MZMs at center frequency of 103 GHz. We discuss maximum bandwidth of different modulation formats under forward error correction (FEC) threshold (3.8 x 10(-3)). Up to 40-Gbps 16-QAM OFDM signals is achieved over 25-km fiber and 2-m wireless transmission. To overcome the penalty from uneven frequency response, bit-loading algorithm is applied to discuss data rate and spectral efficiency with signal bandwidth from 5 to 10 GHz. With 10-GHz bandwidth, 46.4-Gb/s data rate and 4.64-bit/s/Hz spectral efficiency was achieved. To achieve 40-Gbps data rate, the required bandwidth of OFDM signal with bit-loading is 2 GHz less than that without bit-loading.