An RF-assisted 112 Gbit/s transmitter based on optical phase modulation is presented. The system uses two closely spaced sub-channels generated using radio frequency (RF) electronics. Numerical simulations as well as experiments over 824 km of installed fiber are used for evaluation. The analysis shows that performance almost as good as for a conventional Mach-Zehnder modulator can be obtained. Although a relatively high OSNR is required due to the large fraction of power residing in the optical carrier, very small penalty is observed for optimum power levels in the transmission link.

A 112-Gb/s radio-frequency (RF)-assisted dual carrier, polarization-multiplexed 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmitter and receiver are evaluated using a 542-km field deployed fiber link. The introduction of multicarrier radio technologies in transmitter and receiver showed no significant transmission penalty.

Wireless communication plays an important role in the digitization of industries. A 5G cellular communication system enables several industrial automation use cases. Fifth-generation deployments in industrial use cases have mainly been carried out in the sub-7 GHz frequency range. In this work, we empirically study 5G system performance in the millimeter wavelength (mmW) range for industrial use cases: additive manufacturing processes and precision manufacturing robotics. We carry out an experimental performance evaluation of a commercially available non-public 5G mmW system to assess its latency, reliability and throughput for uplink and downlink data traffic in a real industrial environment. We also investigate the impact of various 5G configurations on 5G performance characteristics with insights from the baseband log information as well as unidirectional latency measurements. Our empirical results indicate that 5G mmW system can achieve low latency with high reliability in both one-way traffic directions. The throughput is observed to be high for line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios, making the use of the 5G mmW system appealing especially for data rate-intensive and time-critical industrial use cases. We also observe that industrial environments with lots of metal and reflective surfaces provide favorable propagation conditions for non-LOS transmissions. Our results indicate that static industrial use cases with low mobility can leverage the performance benefits of 5G mmW systems.

Transmission of 86 dense wavelength division multiplexed channels on a 50-GHz grid, carrying 112-Gb/s radio-frequency-assisted dual-channel dual-polarization 16-QAM (8.6-Tb/s), was successfully demonstrated in a straight-line transmission link. Required bit-error rate before forward error correction was obtained after 1200 km of ultralow-loss G.652 fiber (0.17-dB/km attenuation) and after 881 km of conventional G.652 fiber (0.21-dB/km attenuation).

Positioning with 5G signals generally requires connection to several base stations (BSs), which makes positioning more demanding in terms of infrastructure than communications. To address this issue, there have been several theoretical studies on single BS positioning, leveraging high-resolution angle and delay estimation and multipath exploitation possibilities at mmWave frequencies. This paper presents the first realistic experimental validation of such studies, involving a commercial 5G mmWave BS and a user equipment (UE) development kit mounted on a test vehicle. We present the relevant signal models, signal processing methods (including channel parameter estimation and position estimation), and validate these based on real data collected in an outdoor science park environment. Our results indicate that positioning is possible, but the performance with a single BS is limited by the knowledge of the position and orientation of the infrastructure and the multipath visibility and diversity.