A medium access control protocol for radio over fiber wireless LAN operating in the 60-GHz band

Radio over fiber (RoF) technology has been suggested as a cost-effective solution to meet modern ever increasing user bandwidth demands and mobility. A system based on this technology has properties quite different from those of conventional WLAN systems in that every room in a building hosts at least one picocell having its own base station (BS). Thus a challenging problem lies in the medium access control (MAC) protocol design so that it can support QoS requirements as well as a fast and simple handover. In this paper a MAC protocol based on frequency switching (FS) codes is proposed, and constraints on some important parameters are examined. Six variants of the MAC protocol are proposed and discussed.