A novel balanced modulation and detection scheme for analog fiber optic links is proposed to overcome the limitations in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and dynamic range (DR). In this scheme, the modulating signal is split into positive and negative halves and applied to a pair of laser diodes. Both arms of the link will convey a half-wave rectified version of the signal. At the receiving end the signal is restored via differential detection. Calculation results show that significant improvement in link SNR together with suppression of second-order distortions are achieved
