Radio-over-fibre technologies arising from the Building the future Optical Network in Europe (BONE) project

[EN] This study describes a wide range of salient radio-over-fibre system issues. Impulse radio and multiband ultra-wideband signal distribution over both single-mode fibre and multi-mode fibre (MMF) implementations are considered. Carrier frequencies ranging from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, up to 60 GHz, are featured, and the use of microring laser transmitters is discussed. A cost-performance comparative analysis of competing distributed antenna system topologies is presented, and a theoretical approach to understanding the factors underlying radio-over-MMF performance for within-building applications is discussed. Finally, techniques to minimise thermal impacts on performance are described and novel energy-efficient schemes are introduced. Overall, this study provides a snap-shot of research being undertaken by European institutes involved in the Building the future Optical Network in Europe (BONE) project.The work described in this paper was carried out with the support of the EU-FP7 Network of Excellence BONE project.Parker, M.; Walker, SD.; Llorente, R.; Morant, M.; Beltrán, M.; Möllers, I.; Jäger, D.... (2010). Radio-over-fibre technologies arising from the Building the future Optical Network in Europe (BONE) project. IET Optoelectronics. 4(6):247-259. https://doi.org/10.1049/iet-opt.2009.0062S24725946http://www.ftthcouncil.euGomes, N. J., Morant, M., Alphones, A., Cabon, B., Mitchell, J. E., Lethien, C., … Iezekiel, S. (2009). Radio-over-fiber transport for the support of wireless broadband services [Invited]. Journal of Optical Networking, 8(2), 156. doi:10.1364/jon.8.000156Thakur, M. P., Quinlan, T. J., Bock, C., Walker, S. D., Toycan, M., Dudley, S. E. M., … Ben-Ezra, Y. (2009). 480-Mbps, Bi-Directional, Ultra-Wideband Radio-Over-Fiber Transmission Using a 1308/1564-nm Reflective Electro-Absorption Transducer and Commercially Available VCSELs. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 27(3), 266-272. doi:10.1109/jlt.2008.2005644ECMA-368 International Standard: ‘High rate ultra wideband PHY and MAC standard’, December 2008FCC 02-48: ‘Revision of part 15 of the commission's rules regarding ultra-wideband transmission systems’, April 2002ECC∕DEC∕(06)04: ‘On the harmonised conditions for devices using ultra-wideband (UWB) technology in bands below 10.6 GHz’, March 2006ETSI EN 302 065 V1.1.1 (2008-02): ‘Electromagnetic compatibility and radio spectrum matters (ERM); ultra wideband (UWB) technologies for communication purposes; harmonized EN covering the essential requirements of article 3.2 of the R&TTE Directive’, February 2008WiMedia Alliance: Worldwide regulatory status [online]. Available at: http://www.wimedia.orgMikroulis, S., Simos, H., Roditi, E., & Syvridis, D. (2005). Ultrafast all-optical AND logic operation based on four-wave mixing in a passive InGaAsP-InP microring resonator. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 17(9), 1878-1880. doi:10.1109/lpt.2005.853260Argyris, A., Hamacher, M., Chlouverakis, K. E., Bogris, A., & Syvridis, D. (2008). Photonic Integrated Device for Chaos Applications in Communications. Physical Review Letters, 100(19). doi:10.1103/physrevlett.100.194101Win, M. Z., & Scholtz, R. A. (1998). On the robustness of ultra-wide bandwidth signals in dense multipath environments. IEEE Communications Letters, 2(2), 51-53. doi:10.1109/4234.660801Flatman, A.: In-premises optical fibre installed base analysis to 2007. Presented at the IEEE 802.3 10GbE over FDDI Grade Fibre Study Group, Orlando, FL, March 2004Raddatz, L., & White, I. H. (1999). Overcoming the modal bandwidth limitation of multimode fiber by using passband modulation. IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, 11(2), 266-268. doi:10.1109/68.740725Hartmann, P., Xin Qian, Wonfor, A., Penty, R. V., & White, I. H. (2005). 1-20 GHz Directly Modulated Radio over MMF Link. 2005 International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics. doi:10.1109/mwp.2005.203548Kanprachar, S., & Jacobs, I. (2003). Diversity coding for subcarrier multiplexing on multimode fibers. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 51(9), 1546-1553. doi:10.1109/tcomm.2003.816981Gasulla, I., & Capmany, J. (2006). Transfer function of multimode fiber links using an electric field propagation model: Application to Radio over Fibre Systems. Optics Express, 14(20), 9051. doi:10.1364/oe.14.009051Al-Raweshidy, H., and Komaki, S.: ‘Radio over fiber technologies for mobile communication networks’, (Artech House 2002)Sauer, M., Kobyakov, A., & George, J. (2007). Radio Over Fiber for Picocellular Network Architectures. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 25(11), 3301-3320. doi:10.1109/jlt.2007.906822Gomes, N. J., Nkansah, A., & Wake, D. (2008). Radio-Over-MMF Techniques—Part I: RF to Microwave Frequency Systems. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 26(15), 2388-2395. doi:10.1109/jlt.2008.925624Rajan, G., Semenova, Y., Pengfei Wang, & Farrell, G. (2009). Temperature-Induced Instabilities in Macro-Bend Fiber Based Wavelength Measurement Systems. Journal of Lightwave Technology, 27(10), 1355-1361. doi:10.1109/jlt.2009.2014081Montalvo, J., Vázquez, C., & Montero, D. S. (2006). CWDM self-referencing sensor network based on ring resonators in reflective configuration. Optics Express, 14(11), 4601. doi:10.1364/oe.14.00460

Performance evaluation of a Radio over Fiber (ROF) system subject to the transmitter's limitations for application in broadband networks

The increasing demand for high data rates in wireless networks indicates Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) as an excellent candidate for physical layer infrastructure in the development of future broadband communication systems. In this work, a thorough investigation on the performance of an intensity-modulation direct detection (IM-DD) RoF system utilizing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is performed, emphasizing on the transmitter's impairments, and to what extend the above limitations are compensated by typical demodulation techniques implied in OFDM technology. It is shown that an acceptable performance is depicted up to 5.8GHz carrier frequency, by a proper adjustment of the laser's current RF amplitude level. © 2008 IEEE

Corpus design for a unit selection TtS system with application to Bulgarian

In this paper we present the process of designing an efficient speech corpus for the first unit selection speech synthesis system for Bulgarian, along with some significant preliminary results regarding the quality of the resulted system. As the initial corpus is a crucial factor for the quality delivered by the Text-to-Speech system, special effort has been given in designing a complete and efficient corpus for use in a unit selection TTS system. The targeted domain of the TTS system and hence that of the corpus is the news reports, and although it is a restricted one, it is characterized by an unlimited vocabulary. The paper focuses on issues regarding the design of an optimal corpus for such a framework and the ideas on which our approach was based on. A novel multi-stage approach is presented, with special attention given to language and speaker dependent issues, as they affect the entire process. The paper concludes with the presentation of our results and the evaluation experiments, which provide clear evidence of the quality level achieved. © 2011 Springer-Verlag

Open Web-Based Text-to-Speech Services for the Citizens

A system is presented that offers a set of complementary services based on text-to-speech technology. The services and the underlying system that supports them are described. These services include: (a) a service for automatic document-to-speech conversion via e-mail, (b) an open library of audio books, and (c) a dynamic audio news service. The system seeks to maximize the availability and the social impact of text-to-speech technology, making its benefits widely available to the public through open services that address important daily needs of persons with visual impairments and reading difficulties. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

An efficient and robust pitch marking algorithm on the speech waveform for TD-PSOLA

In a Text-to-Speech system based on time-domain techniques that employ pitch-synchronous manipulation of the speech waveforms, one of the most important issues that affect the output quality is the way the analysis points of the speech signal are estimated and the actual points, i.e. the analysis pitchmarks. In this paper we present our methodology for calculating the pitchmarks of a speech waveform, a pitchmark detection algorithm, which after thorough experimentation and in comparison with other algorithms, proves to behave better with our TD-PSOLA-based Text-to-Speech synthesizer (Time- Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap Add Text to Speech System)

An overview of the ILSP unit selection text-to-speech synthesis system

This paper presents an overview of the Text-to-Speech synthesis system developed at the Institute for Language and Speech Processing (ILSP). It focuses on the key issues regarding the design of the system components. The system currently fully supports three languages (Greek, English, Bulgarian) and is designed in such a way to be as language and speaker independent as possible. Also, experimental results are presented which show that the system produces high quality synthetic speech in terms of naturalness and intelligibility. The system was recently ranked among the first three systems worldwide in terms of achieved quality for the English language, at the international Blizzard Challenge 2013 workshop. © 2014 Springer International Publishing