Successive interference cancellation in the uplink of Radio-over-Fiber systems

Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) is a well-known technique for enhancing wireless channel efficiency by allowing concurrent transmissions from multiple users. This multiuser detection technique is usually used in cellular systems. In this paper we adapt it to Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) system for the same purpose. Due to the similarity to using SIC in typical cellular networks, we mainly focus on exploring the uniqueness of applying SIC in a distributed antenna application of RoF for uplink communication. We find that the physical channel capacity is decreased by additional noise in distributed antennas, but the MAC layer throughput could still be increased due to simultaneous transmission. We show that the performance can be further improved by employing transmit power control at the terminals and amplification control at the remote access units. All these findings make us believe that SIC is a promising technique in RoF system.