A 60 GHz Wireless Home Area Network With Radio Over Fiber Repeaters

Home area networks will have to deal with the future multigigabit wireless systems that are emerging or are under development . These millimeter-wave radio systems achieve data rates up to several Gb/s per channel, but over short distance. So, to expand the radio coverage, we propose to introduce a radio-over-fiber (RoF) infrastructure at home. This paper presents a complete study of a RoF system: the 60 GHz radio coverage is extended using a RoF link working at intermediate frequency with two hops in the air. An experimental setup of such an infrastructure has been realized and characterized. A low-cost solution, working at 850 nm, was chosen using multimode fiber and off-the-shelf millimeter-wave and photonic components. Finally, a real-time transmission between two commercial WirelessHD devices working at 3 Gb/s has been carried out.