Digital radio over fiber for LTE-advanced: Opportunities and challenges

This paper investigates the opportunities of using the Digital-RoF for LTE-Advanced and beyond systems. It shows that the DRoF is an enabler of several LTE-Advanced features that need high information exchanges and coordination between base stations. It can also reduce the network deployment costs and increase the energy saving. However, this implies several challenges such as the existence of standards able to define connections between different base station components with the fiber. Besides, the use of carrier aggregation and the enhanced MIMO increases the bit rate supported by the D-RoF which could be critical for the fiber availability.