Radio over Fiber Technology and Its CNR Penalty Analysis

With the advent of popular bandwidth-hungry applications such as High-Definition (HD) Video and high-speed Internet, future wireless systems must offer data speeds exceeding 1 Gbps. Because of limited frequency spectra at low frequencies, coupled with congestion caused by the large number of consumer products sharing the frequency spectra, it will be necessary to utilize higher carrier frequencies in the future, including mm-waves, to achieve much faster wireless communication at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. For the sake of reducing infrastructure cost and antenna site complexity in the access architecture of the emerging high-capacity wireless access networks, the benefits of a transparent radio-over-fiber distribution antenna system which enables the access control, generation and processing of radio signals at a centralized control station, and their distribution to simplified antenna stations via optical fiber has been long recognized. The link between the base station (BS) and the antenna is an optical fiber cable makes the physical deployment of the hardware, much easier. Radio over Fiber technology (RoF), it is an integration of wireless and fiber optic networks.