Coverage Efficiency of Radio-Over-Fiber Network for High-Speed Railways

Due to the rapid development of high-speed railways all over the world, it is very promising to deliver public broadband wireless network to passengers aboard high-speed trains. However, deploying conventional cellular network along the railway will lead to low coverage efficiency and radio resource waste, where a large part of service coverage area may not have any users' traffic at all. A model of analyzing the coverage efficiency of the conventional network and Radio over Fiber (RoF) network is presented in this paper. Based on certain parameters of Chinese high-speed railway scenario, simulation results demonstrate that the coverage efficiency of the RoF network improves greatly compared with the conventional network. In addition, the number of Remote Antenna Units (RAUs) mounted along the railway may be less than the number of antennas installed on the roof of the high-speed train due to initial infrastructure cost. The optimal match of the antennas and RAUs is proposed to maximum the coverage efficiency in this paper. The conclusions provide observations to guide RoF cell planning for high-speed railways.