A performance study of optical subsystem equalization in a WCDMA-based Radio-over-Fiber communication system

In this paper the impact of a Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) subsystem on the Bit Error Rate (BER) and Total Degradations (TD) performances of Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) is evaluated. The study investigates the use of pilot-aided channel estimation to compensate for the optical subsystem's nonlinearities in the presence of AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise), different load factors (LFs,) and Spreading Factors (SFs). The results show that pilot-aided channel estimation is an effective method for compensating the impairments of the optical subsystem. It is found that there is always a suitable pilot power level which optimizes the system performance, however the optimum achievable performance depends on the load factor, spreading factor, and pilot power level. Also, SF has more impact on the system performance in comparison to LF.