On radio over fiber for heterogeneous wireless networks

The paper provides an overview of the radio over fiber (RoF) technology and its potential use in heterogeneous wireless networks. Wireless communications have seen a huge growth in the last decade. It has been estimated that five in every six people in the entire world will have a mobile phone in 2010. The vast growing use of Internet on the mobile devices has also been increased significantly. In order to provide a broadband access for mobile communications, a new wireless infrastructure (fiber optic networks for distributed, extendible heterogeneous radio architectures and service provisioning - FUTON) based on RoF technology has been introduced. The project adopts centralized processing of radio signals for number of wireless base stations can enhance the network performance in terms of bandwidth, and QoS parameters. The simplified remote access units (RAU) are expected to not only increase the performance but also help to reduce the overall coast of the infrastructure.