Cascaded digital-analog radio-over-fiber for efficient SNR scaling at >10 dB per extra bandwidth.

Efficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and spectral efficiency (SE) trade-off can offer fundamental guiding law for future large-capacity and high-fidelity mobile fronthaul. In this Letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a cascaded digital-analog radio-over-fiber (CDA-RoF) scheme, which transmits digitized and analog segments using time-division-multiplexing aggregation. Specifically, multiple digital parts generated by a rounding function describe the main features of the original waveform, while the residual error is magnified and delivered as analog RoF with SE advantage. Based on a 20-GHz O-band directly modulated laser (DML), an SNR enhancement of >10 dB is observed for each extra bandwidth. Up to 70.4-dB SNR is also achieved for a 3.5-GHz 1048576-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (1048576-QAM) signal after 20-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission.