The FUTON prototype: Broadband communication through coordinated multi-point using a novel integrated optical/wireless architecture

The growing relevance of wireless communications has been driving research and development to enable cost-efficient support of very high data rates to be delivered to a large number of users. The high bandwidth targets for future networks are well reflected in the ITU´s call for IMT-Advanced. As interference poses the main limitation in today´s networks, cooperative signal processing (often referred to as coordinated multi-point, CoMP) is seen as a key enabler to achieve these targets. However, cooperation among base stations in traditional cellular infrastructures is problematic because interconnections (referred to as backhaul) are often very limited in capacity and investigations on more flexible and cost-efficient future architectures are in progress. A promising concept was proposed in the European research project FUTON. It is based on the use of radio-over-fiber (RoF) technology to create a distributed antenna system (DAS) that is capable of supporting the high requirements of future wireless networks. In the scope of the project, a prototype system was built as a proof of concept. In this contribution, we present measurement results from the prototype system that demonstrate the potential of the FUTON architecture.