Radio-over-Fiber Aided Base Station Coordination for OFDM

Radio over Fiber (RoF) distribution aided co-operation of Remote Access Points (RAPs) is proposed for jointly transmitting data to the users in the downlink (DL) of a Multiple Input Multiple Output Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) system. Joint transmission is performed with the aid of Block Diagonalization (BD), where the transmitted signal is pre-distorted in order to overcome the non-linearity imposed by the optical modulator. We demonstrate that with adequate design, the users can obtain high data rates with very small degradation introduced by the RoF transmission. Quantitatively, when M=7 RAPs, each equipped with t=2 transmit antennas (TAs) each, cooperate to serve N=7 simultaneous users, also equipped with r=2 receive antennas (RAs), the SNR degradation is kept below 0.1 dB compared to a system assuming a perfect RoF channel. On the other hand, the SNR performance degradation is around 1.2 dB, when the number of antennas at the transmitters and the receivers is increased to t=r=8.