Photonic-Assisted Scheme for Simultaneous Self-Interference Cancellation, Fiber Dispersion Immunity, and High-Efficiency Harmonic Down-Conversion

A photonic approach to the cancellation of self-interference in the optical domain with fiber dispersion immunity and harmonic frequency down-conversion function is proposed based on an integrated, dual-parallel, dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator (DP-DMZM). A dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator (DMZM) is used as an optical interference canceller, which cancels the self-interference from the impaired signal before fiber transmission to avoid the effect of fiber transmission on the cancellation performance. Another DMZM is used to provide carrier-suppressed, local-oscillation (LO)-modulated, high-order double optical sidebands for harmonic frequency down-conversion to release the strict demand for high-frequency LO sources. By regulating the DC bias of the main modulator, the signal of interest (SOI) can be down-converted to the intermediated frequency (IF) band after photoelectric conversion with improved frequency-conversion efficiency, immunity to the fiber-dispersion-induced power-fading (DIPF) effect, and effective signal recovery. Theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the desired SOI in the X and K bands with a bandwidth of 500 MHz and different modulation formats can be down-converted to the IF frequency. The self-interference noise with the 2 GHz bandwidth is canceled, and successful signal recovery is achieved after a 10 km fiber transmission. The recovery performance of down-converted signals and the self-interference cancellation depth under different interference-to-signal ratios (ISRs) is also investigated. In addition, the compensation performance of DIPF is verified, and a 6 dB improvement in frequency conversion gain is obtained compared with previous work. The proposed scheme is compact, cost-effective, and thus superior in wideband self-interference cancellation, long-range signal transmission, and effective recovery of weak desired signals.