First experimental demonstration of dispersion-diversity multicore fiber optical beamforming

A joint work from APL and PRL groups about dispersion-diversity multicore fiber optical beamforming has been published in Optics Express journal.

Phased array antenna (PAA) beam-steering in high radiofrequency bands will be key for upcoming 5G & Beyond wireless communications systems. As a compact and efficient solution to provide tunable beam steering simultaneously to parallel antenna distribution and connectivity, researchers from APL and PRL groups experimentally demonstrate, for the first time to their knowledge, tunable optical beamforming implemented on a dispersion-diversity multicore optical fiber.

Experiment setup

Next-generation fiber-wireless communications systems will benefit from the demonstrated dispersion-diversity MCF optical beamforming in terms of flexibility, versatility, capacity, and connectivity along with reduced size, weight, and power consumption.

All in all, dispersion-diversity MCFs open the door towards the implementation of compact and versatile fiber-distributed signal processing, where both distribution and processing functionalities are provided within the same fiber medium. Other RF and optical signal processing functionalities, such as tunable microwave signal filtering, arbitrary waveform generation as well as time differentiators or integrators, can also be implemented by this approach.

View the full publication here.

The research of the Antennas and Propagation Lab (APL) is focused on the analysis and design of antennas for microwave, millimeter and THz applications, and in the study of propagation and modeling of the radio channel, both theoretically and experimental (propagation measures).

The Photonics Research Labs (PRL) mission is to produce high-quality scientific knowledge in the field of optics, quantum optics and photonics, through research projects, R&D contracts and collaboration agreements with the private sector. The PRL research activity is focused on several applications of photonics, mainly on optical communications of analog and digital signals, radio-over-fiber systems and photonic integrated circuits.