4096-QAM OFDM THz-over-fiber MIMO transmission using delta-sigma modulation

A terahertz (THz)-over-fiber multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission of 4096-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) supported by 46-GBaud quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signal at 320 GHz is experimentally demonstrated in this letter. By employing the polarization division multiplexing (PDM) technique and 1-bit delta-sigma modulation (DSM) quantization, we successfully implement 4.6-GHz 4096-QAM OFDM signal transmission over 20 km of standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) and a 3-m MIMO wireless link, and satisfy the soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC) threshold of 1.0 × 10 -2 with 15% overhead, which corresponds to a net rate of 84.4 Gbps for THz-over-fiber transmission. To the best of our knowledge, fusing OFDM and PDM, this is the highest rate achievable for DSM applications in THz communication. This experimental demonstration can provide a promising solution for high-order QAM signals in a fiber-wireless seamless network in future 6G networks.