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IEEE photonics journal

Studying the Double Rayleigh Backscattering Noise Effect on Fiber-Optic Radio Frequency Transfer

Qi Li, Liang Hu, Jianping Chen, Guiling Wu

Published Feb 13, 2021• 18 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the effect of the double Rayleigh backscattering (DRB) noise, in which the interference of the signal light with the double Rayleigh backscattered light, on the fiber-optic radio-frequency (RF) transfer system. Here, we theoretically analyze and experimentally demonstrate that the DRB noise within the fiber link will become the dominative noise on the fiber-optic RF transfer system once narrow linewidth lasers are used. The strong DRB noise is experimentally confirmed through the measurement of the effect of the coherent interference term of the signal light and the double Rayleigh backscattered light on the 100 km RF transfer system. Our results provide evidence that the conventional RF transfer technique with the telecommunications-grade lasers, in which the chromatic dispersion effect in the single-mode fiber is compensated by dispersion compensation fibers (DCFs), could be the better choice for high-performance RF transfer.

DOI
10.1109/jphot.2021.3058171

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Review of Scientific Instruments•Oct 1, 2024•1 citation
We report the effect of the double Rayleigh backscattering (DRB) noise, in which the interference of the signal light with the double Rayleigh backscattered light, on the fiber-optic radio-frequency (RF) transfer system. Here, we theoretically analyze and experimentally demonstrate that the DRB noise within the fiber link will become the dominative noise on the fiber-optic RF transfer system once narrow linewidth lasers are used. The strong DRB noise is experimentally confirmed through the measurement of the effect of the coherent interference term of the signal light and the double Rayleigh backscattered light on the 100 km RF transfer system. Our results provide evidence that the conventional RF transfer technique with the telecommunications-grade lasers, in which the chromatic dispersion effect in the single-mode fiber is compensated by dispersion compensation fibers (DCFs), could be the better choice for high-performance RF transfer.
In this Letter, we propose a fiber-optic radio frequency (RF) transfer based on active phase noise compensation adopting a carrier suppressed double-sideband (CSDSB) signal. The forward CSDSB signal is generated based on the transmitted RF signal at the local site to discriminate from the backward RF signal. The forward and backward signals are transmitted over the same fiber with the same wavelength to guarantee the bidirectional propagation symmetry. The impact of backscattering is efficiently suppressed by electrical filtering at the sites. A 1 GHz signal transfer over a 40 km optical link is performed in a laboratory. The results show that the proposed scheme can improve the short-term stability from 1.9 e-13/s to 3.9 e-14/s in contrast to the scheme with backscattering while reaching a long-term stability of 2.0 e-16/10000 s.
While it has been shown that backscattering induced phase noise can be suppressed by adopting acoustic-optic-modulators (AOMs) at the local and remote sites to break the frequency symmetry in both directions. However, this issue can not be avoided for conventional fiber-optic multiple-access coherent optical phase dissemination in which the interference of the signal light with the Rayleigh backscattered light will probably destroy the coherence of the stabilized optical signal. We suppress the backscattering effect by locally breaking the frequency symmetry at the extraction point by inserting an additional AOM. Here, we theoretically analyze and experimentally demonstrate an add-drop one more AOM approach for suppressing the Rayleigh backscattering within the fiber link. Near-complete suppression of backscattering noise is experimentally confirmed through the measurement the elimination of a common interference term of the signal light and the Rayleigh backscattered light. The results demonstrate that the Rayleigh backscattering light has a limited effect compared to the residual delay-limited fiber phase noise on the system's performance. Our results also provide new evidence that it is possible to largely suppress Rayleigh and other backscattering noise within a long optical fiber link, where the accumulated phase noise could be large, by using frequency symmetry breaking at each access node to achieve robust multiple-access coherent optical phase propagation in spite of scatters or defects.
We propose a passive compensation fiber-optic radio frequency (RF) transfer scheme with a nonsynchronized RF stable source during a round-trip time, which can avoid high-precision phase-locking and efficiently suppress the effect of backscattering only using two wavelengths at the same time. A stable frequency signal is directly reproduced by frequency mixing at the remote site. The proposed scheme is validated by the experiment over a 40 km single mode fiber spool using nonsynchronized common commercial RF sources. The influence of the stability of nonsynchronized RF sources on the frequency transfer is investigated over different length fiber links.
The stable radio frequency (RF) transmission scheme involving single wavelength has received increasing attention due to the feature of accurate phase information extraction. However in single laser system, the single side band (SSB) phase noise of output signal will be deteriorated by Rayleigh scattering during long-distance optical transmission. In this work, we propose an incoherent Rayleigh scattering noise depression method in the passive phase compensation stable RF transmission scheme with single laser. The carrier of scattering light is suppressed with narrow-band optical filter based on the Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effect, so that the noise generated by the beat of scattering itself will be significantly reduced. As a result, a 5-GHz RF signal stability transmission over 50-km single mode fiber is demonstrated experimentally. The SSB phase noise at 10 KHz offset is 10.9 dB lower than the scenarios without incoherent Rayleigh scattering noise depression. Meanwhile, the phase jitter mean square error is 1.12 ps during1×1041\times 10^{4}1×104seconds.
In this Letter, a passive phase noise compensation-based fiber-optic frequency transfer scheme with frequency dividing and filtering is proposed. The probe signal is divided at the remote site and effectively discriminated from the backscattering noises by electrical bandpass filtering at the local site. By combining the bidirectional transmission with the same wavelength on a single fiber, the scheme can reach the maximum bidirectional propagation symmetry and effectively suppress the effect of backscattering at the same time. The proposed scheme is experimentally demonstrated and compared with the scheme with backscattering. The relative frequency stabilities of 3.9×10(-14)/s and 1.2×10(-16)/10(4) s are reached for 40 km transfer, which obviously outperform the scheme with backscattering, especially in terms of short-term stability, and are closed to the floor of the back-to-back experimental system.
In this paper, we demonstrate stable radio frequency (RF) transfer via metropolitan optical fiber link in the Beijing area. The phase variation of the RF signal is compensated by a phase conjugation method incorporating two high-performance phase-locked loops. The wavelength conversion module extends the transmission length to 200 km with only two parallel 50 km dark optical fibers available. We optimize the configuration of dispersion compensation and optical amplification due to the high loss (0.31 dB/km) of the optical fiber link. At the same time, comparative experiments verify the short-term instability limitation that arises from the group velocity dispersion of the optical fiber link. The measured standard Allan deviation of the 2.4 GHz RF transmission system with dispersion compensation is 4.5 × 10-14/1 and 2.6 × 10-17/20 000 s, which is superior to that of the reference rubidium clock. The short-term instability of the system is deteriorated to 2.5 × 10-13/1 s without dispersion compensation.