Concatenated fibre-wireless channel identification in a multiuser CDMA environment

Radio-over-fibre (ROF) has received increasing attention for its ability to enable broadband wireless access. This fibre-based wireless access scheme meets the demand for broadband service by integrating the high capacity of optical networks with the flexibility of radio networks (the optical and wireless channels are concatenated with one another). There are, however, impairments that come with this appealing technology. The nonlinear distortion of the optical link and the multipath dispersion of the wireless channel are two of the major factors. In order to limit the effects of these distortions, estimation, and subsequently equalisation, of the concatenated fibre- wireless channel needs to be done. An estimation algorithm for the fibre-wireless uplink in a multiuser code division multiple access (CDMA) environment is presented using pseudonoise training sequences. It has already been shown by Fernando et al. (2001) that identification of the fibre- wireless uplink is possible in a single user CDMA environment. However, the more difficult task of identification in a multiuser spread spectrum environment, which is more realistic, is shown. In the multiuser case, the cumulative effect of multiuser interference, multipath dispersion, nonlinear distortion and noise should all be handled together which makes it more challenging. Numerical evaluations of the developed algorithm show that a good estimation of both the linear and nonlinear systems is possible in the presence of 16 independent users and an signal- to-noise ratio (SNR) of 22 dB. The estimation accuracy increases with the length of the PN sequence.