This paper newly proposes radio-over-fiber systems using cascaded radio-to-optic direct conversion (ROC) scheme. The ROC system can convert a radio signal into an optical signal with the same signal format. The received carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) performance of the radio-over-fiber systems using the ROC/heterodyne detection (HD) scheme and the ROC/self-heterodyne detection (SHD) scheme are theoretically analyzed. The optimization of an optical modulation index (OMI) in each radio base station (RBS) is also presented. By using the proposed OMI optimization method, the ROC/HD and the ROC/SHD schemes are shown to provide approximately 16 dB and 14 dB improvement over the intensity modulation/direct detection scheme when the number of RBS is 20 and the radio-frequency (RF) signal bandwidth is 150 MHz, respectively. The ROC/SHD scheme enables a receiver structure to become simple while still achieving high received CNR.