OFDM modulation study for a radio-over-fiber system for wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11a)

Radio-over-fiber (RoF) technology has several benefits such as larger bandwidth, reduced power consumption etc. that has made it an attractive implementation option for various communication systems including wireless LANs. This paper investigates the feasibility of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as a modulation technique for a RoF based WLAN system in consistency with IEEE 802.11a. Results from a Matlab system model, which is consistent with the specifications of IEEE 802.11a, have been included to show the BER performance of the OFDM modulation technique. Next, the paper presents the results obtained from measuring several of the main factors affecting the performance of an OFDM system, including channel noise, multipath delay spread, power clipping, and synchronization requirements.