WiFi transmission in radio-over-fiber systems: Performance of the IEEE 802.11n aggregation mechanism

Radio-over-fiber (RoF) systems use an optical network to transparently distribute radio signals from the access point to distributed remote antennas, combining flexibility and mobility offered by wireless networks with capacity and transparency of fiber-fed networks. In order to offer higher throughput, the recent IEEE 802.11n standard introduces new mechanisms at the physical and MAC layers. In this paper, we investigate the performance when the IEEE 802.11n protocol is used in a RoF architecture. We show that the aggregation mechanism provided by IEEE 802.11n limits the effect of the extra propagation delay which is introduced by optical fibers in RoF systems. In addition, we report that the adaptation of the slot time parameter value is needed to keep the efficiency of the IEEE 802.11n frame aggregation mechanism in RoF networks.