Study of Radio over Fiber Transmission with a Single Line in Ring Topology for Deployment of MIMO Antenna Access Points in a Cell-less Network

Abstract

The massive growth of wireless traffic goes hand in hand with the deployment of advanced radio interfaces as well as network densification. This growth has a direct impact on the radio access architecture, which today is moving from centralized to distributed deployments through the use of a large number of access points (APs). This paper verifies the feasibility of deploying multiple APs in series on a single line in a ring topology in a cell-less network. On the one hand, this technique will further improve the communication capacity and flexibility of a Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) based mobile communication system and will reduce its construction cost. And on the other hand, this deployment topology is a solution to achieve a massive cell-free Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) architecture and a cost-effective fronthaul solution. First, a passive optical add/drop multiplexer (OADM) is used to extract and add downlink and uplink signals from the remote access points of one kilometer. Then, a deployment model is developed with version 17 Optisystem software. The results obtained showed that the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) does not adapt to this multi-carrier transmission to deploy several AP in series on a single line. Thus, the performance degradation increases when the number of APs integrated on the line increases.