Impairment-aware control plane for next Generation Radio-Over-Fiber Access Networks

Radio-over-Fiber is expected to play a key role in the design of Next Generation Radio Access Networks. In this paper, we present an all-optical feeder network architecture called GeRoFAN (Generic Radio-over-Fiber Access Network) able to federate 4th generation radio mobile base stations. Thanks to its original control plane, the GeRoFAN system enables broadband ubiquitous services by dynamic management of radio resources. However, because of the transmission impairments induced by the optical layer on the transported radio channels, this broadband ubiquity may be altered. Through a study case, we highlight the necessity of an impairment-aware control plane to achieve an efficient use of the optical resources while preserving the signal quality of the transported radio channels.