Analog radio of fiber link of 2-Gbaud OOK/BPSK radio frequency-orbital angular momentum beam transmission over 19.4 km.

The 5G mobile communication system provides ultrareliable, low-latency communications at up to 10 Gbps. However, the scale and power consumption of 5G is tremendous owing to a large number of antenna drivers required by the massive multiple-input multiple-output technique. The 6G system will require an architectural paradigm shift to resolve this problem. In this study, we propose an analog RoF downlink scheme for 6G wireless communications. The upcoming oversized base station problem is solved using photonics techniques. The antennas are driven together within the optical domain at a centralized station. The proposed system uses orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams as the generated space-division-multiplexing beams. An RF-OAM beam has a weak coupling effect between different modes, which will dramatically decrease the complexity of the signal processing. In our proof-of-concept experiment, the generated RF-OAM beam was shown to carry a 2-Gbaud OOK/BPSK signal in the Ku-band. Signals were transmitted over a 19.4-km RoF link without dispersion-induced power fading. In addition, by switching the OAM beams, a two-dimensional direction scanning was achieved.