Multiuser - MIMO for capacity gain in Fi-Wi hybrid networks

Fiber to the Rooms paradigm is gaining a lot of attention recently. In this paradigm, the last mile wireless (viz., IEEE 802.11x) connectivity, backed by optical fiber infrastructure, supports uncompressed high data rate while rendering seamless mobility and higher frequency reuse. To provide cost effective solution, Access Points (AP) in each room are replaced by distributed antennas. A centralized home communication controller provides AP functionality. WiFi inherently suffers from the problem of hidden nodes (HN). This problem persists even in the Fiber-Wireless (Fi-Wi) hybrid world causing degradation of throughput. In this paper we propose a Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) uplink technique using both spatial and optical wavelength multiplexing. This scheme can increase the data rate significantly through diversity gain or spatial multiplexing. The proposed scheme is compared against an eminent joint decoding technique called Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) adapted for operability in Fi-Wi indoor environment. The main contribution is that we propose an unique MU-MIMO uplink technique for Fi-Wi Hybrid indoor environment which address the problem of HN. We evaluate the performance of our proposed MU-MIMO technique based on ergodic capacity and probability of bit error.