Green in-building optical/wireless networks: When, where and how

Future in-building networks will most likely consist of two segments - optical and wireless; they will use little or no copper media. In previous work, we´ve analysed a number of green optical/wireless in-building network designs. In this paper, we present a study of why, where and how these networks can be deployed. We consider three different technologies: legacy Baseband-over-Fiber, Analog Radio-over-Fiber and Digital Radio-over-Fiber, in two different deployment scenarios: indoor networks and high user density open space/outdoor networks. We also consider two different deployment goals: improved coverage and increased capacity. Our results indicate that for indoor networks cell sizes should be between ~10 m - 15 m with DRoF technologies while for high user density outdoor/open-space networks, cell sizes <; 15 m using ARoF are energy efficient. To improve the coverage, we show that BoF is the most energy efficient technology and there exists an optimum cell size (~40 m for office building networks, > 80 m for open space buildings).