Energy consumption of indoor radio-over-fiber distribution links: Experimental findings

Abstract

Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) based network architectures would allow centralization of signal processing and signal conditioning functions and simple, cost-effective remote units at the cell site. RoF technology results in remote units with few components, however, certain aspects of the technology may inadvertently lead to high power consuming components. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the effect of electrical-optical-electrical (E/O/E) loss and signal bandwidth on the energy consumption of analog and digitized RoF (ARoF and DRoF) links. We also analyze the energy efficiency of multiple services on a single RoF distribution network. Our results show that E/O/E loss significantly degrades the energy efficiency of the ARoF links. DRoF is robust to the E/O/E loss on the optical link but is affected by the loss due to reconstruction of the radio frequency signal at higher Nyquist zones. We also show that increasing the bandwidth improves the energy efficiency. Finally, we demonstrate that the extra energy savings from having multiple services on a single RoF link depends on the wireless environment.

Advances in Improving Energy Efficiency of Fiber–Wireless Access Networks: A Comprehensive Overview

“…In ref. [ 65 ], for an indoor network, a theoretical evaluation model was presented in order to evaluate the effect of wireless bandwidth, multiple services and loss due to electrical–optical–electrical (E/O/E) conversion on the EE of the optical links in A–RoF- and D–RoF-based networks ( Table 2 ). It was shown that E/O/E loss had a large impact on the EE of the optical link when the A–RoF transmission technique was used.…”