Double-locked semiconductor laser for radio-over-fiber uplink transmission

The nonlinear dynamics of an optically injected semiconductor laser are explored for radio-over-fiber uplink transmission. Under optical injection locking, the laser at the base station is operated in the period-one oscillation state, where its intensity oscillates at a tunable microwave frequency. When the oscillation is tuned to the subcarrier frequency, it is further locked by the uplink microwave signal. By simply using an ordinary 2.5-Gbps-grade semiconductor laser, uplink transmission of the phase-shift keying (PSK) signal at a subcarrier of 16 GHz with bit-error rate of less than 10(-11) is demonstrated experimentally. Microwave PSK to optical PSK is achieved at the double-locked laser, which allows all-optical demodulation without any high-speed microwave electronics.