Downlink-uplink timing synchronization and optical multipath limitations in 3GPP TD-LTE Radio-over-Fiber networks

The performance of Time Division-Long Term Evolution (TD-LTE) Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) networks is investigated in this paper, in terms of downlink Physical Data Rate (PDR). It is shown that the accommodation of the extra propagation delay induced by the optical fiber links increases the protocol overheads and reduces the protocol's efficiency.