Signal Processing for Optical Fiber based Wireless Access

Wireless communications has entered a new phase. The focus is shifting from voice to multimedia services, which need wideband radio links. Furthermore, new wireless subscribers are signing up at an increasing rate demanding more capacity. Micro and pico cellular architecture is an attractive solution for both of these issues because, it increases the frequency reuse and enables wideband access. In this micro/pico cell scenario, low power radio access points (RAP’s) should provide wireless access instead of conventional base stations for cost considerations. These radio access points should be robust and have low complexity and connected to the central base station via radio-over-fiber (ROF) links [1]. Figure 1 (left) shows such architecture and Figure 1 (right) gives a closer look at the downlink. The focus of this work is to investigate various signal processing strategies to provide a cost-effective, high performance solution for high-speed fiber based wireless access. We have been investigating signal-processing strategies to improve the performance of fiber based wireless access schemes cost-effectively.