Throughput and QoS improvement of wireless LAN system employing radio over fiber

There are many wireless devices in our society, and new wireless communication standards are continuously appearing. It is annoying for users and also difficult for some to keep up with technology standard changes. Applying radio-over-fiber (RoF) technologies to wireless local area network (WLAN) systems is one possible solution to this problem. However, these systems contain an optical fiber cable, which has a non-negligible propagation delay for IEEE 802.11-based WLANs. This delay caused by optical transmission degrades the throughput and quality-of-service (QoS) of a WLAN system. In this paper, we describe a novel method to resolve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness using computer simulations. We show that the proposed method provides approximately double the total throughput and provides an uplink and downlink frame-rate ratio of one regardless of the optical fiber propagation delay or the number of stations (STAs).