Performance comparison of optical fronthauling techniques for centralized radio access network

This work presents performance comparison of three schemes for fronthauling in Centralized Radio Access Network Architecture (C-RAN) namely, Digitized Baseband over Fiber (DBBoF), Analog Intermediate Frequency over Fiber (AIFoF) and Digitized Intermediate Frequency over Fiber (DIFoF). The SNR and optical power requirements for each of these schemes for a transmission of 20 MHz and 160 MHz WLAN signals through an AWGN wireless channel are compared through simulations. Results indicates that DBBoF and DIFoF techniques require 5 dBm smaller optical power than AIFoF to require same SNR of 17 dB to achieve BER of 10^-3 for 20 MHz signal. For 160 MHz signal DBBoF yields a better performance compared to AIFoF for the same optical power levels, but requires larger line rates.