Radio-Over-Fiber Architectures

Future multigigabit wireless systems (MGWS) dedicated to home-area networking are emerging or are under development. They achieve high data rate up to 5–6 Gb/s over short range. To expand the radio coverage, we propose radio-over-fiber (RoF) architectures, from the most basic (point-to-point) to the most innovative (multipoint-to-multipoint). These RoF infrastructures combine radio and optical links. The simple way to implement RoF technology is to manage the optical media, either using information from the physical (PHY) layer or using information from the media access control (MAC) layer of the radio system. This seems to be the most realistic solution even if it requires the establishment of cooperation between the radio MAC layer and the optical layer. This link can be made only if the RoF operation is taken into account at radio PHY MAC layer of future broadband wireless systems.