Performance evaluation of Millimeter wave and UWB signals over Fiber radio networks

Radio-over-fiber (RoF) networks is the integration of wireless and optical networks. RoF networks is considered as a potential solution for increasing capacity and mobility as well as decreasing costs in the access network. RoF can also be called as Fiber radio networks or Hybrid optical-wireless networks. The concept of RoF means to transport information over optical fiber by modulating the light with the radio signal. This modulation can be done directly with the radio signal or at an intermediate frequency. RoF technique has the potentiality to be the backbone of the wireless access network. Such architecture can give several advantages, such as reduced complexity at the antenna site, radio carriers can be allocated dynamically to the different antenna sites, transparency and scalability. The Fiber-Radio networks transmits data from Central office (CO) to Base station (BS) as optical signal and Base station (BS) to Mobile station (MS) as wireless signal. Due to the signal degradation mechanisms present both in fiber and wireless transmissions, the radio signals transmitted using RoF technology undergoes degradation in their quality, which in turn reduces the overall performance of the RoF system. This paper aims to analyze and evaluate the performance of RoF System, by considering Millimeter wave and UWB signal transmission for WLAN. Special attention is made on chirp effect caused by Mach Zehender (MZ) external optical modulator.