Radio on fiber transmission technique using a conventional intermediate frequency (IF)-band Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) filter has been proposed in order to satisfy the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specification for International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000) cellular systems. For the 3GPP specification, a key issue is to expand the dynamic range limited by clipping distortion of laser diode. In order to expand the dynamic range, for the down link, a narrow bandpass SAW filter is introduced after optical transmission, because the SAW filter can suppress the distortion caused by clipping of laser diode and improve the performance of adjacent channel leakage power ratio. For the up link, an optical modulation index (OMI) of a laser diode is optimized to improve the noise figure (NF) performance by controlling the gain of an amplifier between the antenna and the laser diode. As a result, both power control dynamic range of more than 44 dB in the down link and dynamic range of more than 97 dB in the up link were achieved in 6 km optical transmission. Other important parameters, such as Error Vector Magnitude, Reference Sensitivity Level, and so on in the 3GPP specification, were also satisfied.

We demonstrate that the frequency modulated video signals in the subcarrier multiple access optical network can be satisfactorily transmitted using our proposed method, that broadens an optical spectrum by multiplying the subcarrier signals by an additional signal and that reduces optical beat interference, even if the wavelengths of four Fabry-Perot laser diodes are very close each other.