Optical Fiber Telecommunications VIB: Chapter 21. Advances in 1-100GHz Microwave Photonics: All-Band Optical Wireless Access Networks Using Radio Over Fiber Technologies (Optics and Photonics)

Radio-over-fiber (RoF) link technology has been developed to support multiple wireless signals over optical fiber applications such as mobile backhaul networks and WLANs. Given that conventional wireless networks use packet-switch links between the central office and remote base stations, the cost and complexity of the high-speed wireless networks for data and video transmission increase exponentially while the area of effective coverage decreases. These wireless systems become more inefficient as the data rates and the carrier frequencies required for delivering multi-gigabit wireless services climb higher. However, radio-over-fiber link systems utilizing lightwave to carry multiple analog RF signals through optical fibers can greatly extend the cellular sizes while transparent to the bit rates, modulation formats, and protocols. As a result, the complexity of wireless system to deliver multi-band, multi-gigabit wireless services can be simplified by taking advantages of microwave photonics in optical wireless network design and system integration. The end-to-end RoF systems, from the generation schemes of 1–100 GHz optical wireless signals in the central office to the design of transceivers for base stations and radio access units, are reviewed and investigated in this chapter. Various radio-over-fiber link technologies and the optical wireless interface specifications required to build a converged multi-service, gigabit wireless access network are introduced. The system impairment and its mitigation of radio-over-fiber link transmission will be investigated and analyzed.