Flexible and Scalable Radio over Fiber Architecture

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a scalable Radio over Fiber (RoF) system compliant to 5G fronthauling requirements. The proposed RoF architecture is able to adjust the network resources and capacities to satisfy user demands in terms of service, data rate and bandwidth. The flexibility and the reconfigurability of the proposed topology are provided through the inclusion of flexible network nodes which are at the Central Office (CO), the Remote Node (RN) and the Remote Access Unit (RAU). The centralized management of the RoF system based on a Software Defined Networking (SDN) enables the monitoring of the overhaul RoF system and the reconfiguration of network nodes parameters. The proposed RoF system architecture is designed to support multi-standard operation and mm-wave services. We investigated multi-service operation assuming high speed mm-wave service at 60 GHz besides to conventional wireless services such as WiFi and WiMax. The introduced system is able to operate for different RF bands (2.4, 5.2 and 60 GHz) with various modulation schemas such as BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM and 64QAM, that may be associated to Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and multi-data rates up to 5 Gbps. To validate the RoF system performances, we have considered the Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) and service constellation as figures of merit at the End User (EU). The simulated results testify the architecture viability.