Radio over Fiber based Network Architecture

To meet the explosive demands of high-capacity and broadband wireless access, modern cell-based wireless networks have trends, i.e., continuous increase in the number of cells and utilzation of higher frequency bands. It leads to a large amount of base stations (BSs) to be deployed; therefore, cost-effective BS development is a key to success in the market. In order to reduce the system cost, radio over fiber (RoF) technology has been proposed since it provides functionally simple BSs that are interconnected to a central control station (CS) via an optical fiber. It has the following main features: (1) it is transparent to bandwidth or modulation techniques, (2) simple and small BSs, (3) centralized operation is possible. Extensive research efforts have been devoted to the development of physical layer such as simple BS development and radio signal transport techniques over fiber, but few have been reported about upper layer and resource management issues for RoF networks. In this dissertation, we are concerned with RoF based network architecture that makes efficient use of its centralized control capability to address mobility management and bandwidth allocation. This work consists of three parts. In the first study, we consider RoF based wireless local area network (WLAN) operating at 60 GHz bands, which can provide high capacity wireless access; however, due to high propagation and penetration loss in the frequency bands a typical room in a building surrounded by walls must be supported by at least one BS. As a result, numerous BSs are required to cover the building. In such an environment slight movement of mobile hosts (MHs) could trigger handover, which is quite different situation compared to conventional WLAN systems; therefore, it is obvious that handover management becomes a significant issue. In the study, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol featuring fast and simple handover and quality of service support. It utilizes orthogonal frequency switching codes to avoid co-channel interference between adjacent cells and achieves fast handover at the cost of bandwidth. Six variants of the protocol are considered and evaluated by a simulation study. In the second study, RoF based network architecture for road vehicle communication (RVC) system at mm-wave bands is proposed. In this case handover management becomes even more significant and difficult due to small cell and high user mobility. An MAC protocol based on dynamic time division multiple access (TDMA) is proposed, which supports fast and simple handover as well as bandwidth allocation according to the movement of vehicles. Bandwidth management schemes maintaining high handover quality are also proposed and evaluated by a simulation study. An RoF based broadband wireless access network architecture for sparsely populated rural and remote areas is presented in the third study. In the architecture a CS has optical tunable-transmitter (TT) and tunable-receiver (TR) pairs and utilizes wavelength division multiplexing to access numerous