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Optics Letters

Multiple access fiber-optic radio-frequency transfer, time, and phase synchronization using symmetric carrier configuration and passive optical coupling

Junwei Ren, Yuzhe Ma, Jiaxing Shui, Liang Hu, Jianping Chen, Guiling Wu

Published Sep 10, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

In this Letter, we propose a multiple access fiber-optic radio-frequency transfer, time, and phase synchronization scheme using passive optical coupling and symmetric carrier configuration. In the proposed scheme, the RF signal is distributed to distant nodes via a symmetric carrier configuration, which inherently suppresses link length-dependent phase difference. Access nodes are connected to the fiber link via passive optical coupling. Time signals are generated at each node by leveraging transferred frequency signals and synchronized by time-division multiplexing transmission and active delay compensation. Experimentally, a 2 GHz RF signal is transferred to access and terminal nodes over 20-km and 60-km fiber links, respectively, and compensated separately. The measured frequency stability is better than 4×10 −14 and 2×10 −16 at averaging time of 1 s and 10 4 s, respectively. For the synchronized link, the measured time stability is better than 7 ps at 1 s and 4 ps at 10 4 s. The phase consistency of RF signals is better than 10 ps (2 % of the entire signal cycle) when subjected to changes in link length and system restart.

DOI: 10.1364/ol.611933

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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.

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.

We propose a novel scheme that uses only a single passive phase compensation device to achieve stable optical and radio frequency joint transfer. The phase noises of optical and radio frequency can be simultaneously compensated by passively embedding their phase information on the two optical carrier sidebands generated by an electro-optical modulator without using the phase discrimination and active servo controller. As a result, this scheme has many advantages, such as high spectral purity, short settling time and infinite compensation accuracy. We experimentally demonstrate the joint transfer of optical and 1 GHz RF over 120 km fiber spools. The optical frequency stability achieves 6.9 × 10 −17 at 1 s and 7.03 × 10 −19 at 10000 s, while the 1 GHz RF is 6.47 × 10 −13 at 1 s and 3.96 × 10 −16 at 10000 s.

We have demonstrated accurate frequency transfer via an ultra long span optical-fiber link by passive phase conjugation, which is based on frequency mixing. Combing with the phase-lock-loop, our compensation technique can eliminate the effect of phase noise that introduced during the optical-fiber transmission, so the phase of remote signal is synchronized to the phase of local reference signal. The transfer stability of our experiment with 2.4 GHz frequency signal through a 1007 km fiber link is 6.9_10-14/s and 4.1_10-16/104s.

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.