Analogue Wireless Beamforming Exploiting the Fiber-Nonlinearity of Radio Over Fiber-Based C-RANs

As a key technique of supporting the fixed backbone network, radio over fiber (RoF) systems transmit the radio frequency signals over optical fiber in order to take advantage of their large available bandwidth. In this context, optical fiber aided phased antenna array (PAA) based beamforming techniques have attracted substantial research interest with the goal of improving the cell-edge coverage of cellular base stations. In this paper, we conceive a novel optical fiber aided beamforming technique based on the fiber's nonlinearity to be applied in cloud radio access network (C-RAN). In our proposed technique, the PAA elements are fed by the phase-shifted signals introduced by our highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) aided phase-shifting solution, which results in an angular beamsteering range of around 90°. This can be exploited by sectorization in cellular networks to reduce the cochannel interference imposed. Furthermore, we exploit the proposed RoF-aided phase shifting technique in C-RAN, where our proposed system takes advantage of the centralized signal processing capability of the RoF system to conceive an all-optical processing based tunable beamforming system. While our flexible HNLF-aided phase-shifting process is confined to the central office of the C-RAN, the end users in the C-RAN cellular networks are capable of flexibly choosing the serving remote radio heads and employing diverse wireless transmission techniques. Through integrating our HNLF-aided phase-shifting design into the proposed C-RAN, we impose as little as 0.1 dB signal-to-noise ratio degradation compared to its traditional electronic counterpart, which requires extra phase-shifters.