ROF V/s Traditional Fiber as a Backhaul Technology: Comparisons of Cellular and Ethernet Networks based on SNR and Capacity

Abstract

Radio over Fiber is the future technology. It will take over all traditional fiber technology, as it offers quality and service up to the requirement of the users. The ROF is being implemented over traditional fiber widely as it offers replacing of optical fiber's high range and also flexible in wireless mode. Along with the ease, optical fiber bandwidth utilization increase by this. Because fiber is a high bandwidth, low latency, and a scalable solution therefore it is mostly used as a backbone technology in wireless Ethernet and cellular networks. Radio over Fiber technology, it is amalgamation of radio waves and optical based networks and it is an emergent feasible solution for providing high capacity and wireless connectivity, meanwhile reducing costs in the network which is accessible. The purpose of this research is to conduct a comparative study on implementation of ROF over wireless Ethernet network and cellular networks. Recently fiber optics has become a standard medium for these heterogeneous networks and introducing radio technology over this medium can prove to be the next generation solution. SNR and Capacity are the parameters that are critically evaluated for the purpose of comparative study on currently implemented fiber with ROF over these heterogeneous networks. Then comparative study is used to identify ROF is a feasible alternative as compared to traditional fiber as the backbone technology. A modeled ROF and optical fiber network is deployed over MATLAB for acquiring the desired results through simulation to prove the hypothesis. In future some other heterogeneous networks and several parameters like bit error rate and carrier to noise ratio can be analyzed on radio over fiber. A prototype of such an implementation will be proposed and design for small scale deployment to observe the behavior of radio over fiber in terms of aforementioned parameters.