Fiber Aided Wireless Network Architecture

We introduce the concept of a fiber aided wireless network architecture (FAWNA), which allows high-speed mobile connectivity by leveraging the speed of optical networks. Specifically, we consider a single-input, multiple-output (SIMO) FAWNA, which consists of a SIMO wireless channel interfaced with an optical fiber channel through wireless-optical interfaces. We propose a design where the received wireless signal at each interface is sampled and quantized before being sent over the fiber. The capacity of our scheme approaches the capacity of the architecture, exponentially with fiber capacity. We also show that for a given fiber capacity, there is an optimal operating wireless bandwidth and number of interfaces. We show that the optimal way to divide the fiber capacity among the interfaces is to ensure that each interface gets enough rate so that its noise is dominated by front end noise rather than by quantizer distortion. We also show that rather than dynamically change rate allocation based on channel state, a less complex, fixed rate allocation scheme can be adopted with very small loss in performance.