Impairment-aware radio-over-fiber control plane for LTE antenna backhauling

Provisioning ubiquitous broadband wireless services necessitates the duplication of the radio equipment or/and the reduction of the size of the radio cells. However, both approaches are not economically viable for the operators. The concept of distributed antennas is proposed as an alternative solution offering low-cost broadband access. In this matter, we propose an innovative Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture called GeRoFAN for Generic Radio-over-Fiber Access Network. The GeRoFAN architecture is based on a transparent optical loop connecting low-cost 4G radio-system antennas using analog Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) technology. However, by transporting Radio Frequencies (RFs) over an Optical Channel (OC), the composite signal suffers from various physical layer impairments that may degrade the system capacity. Supported by a mathematical model reflecting the relevant optical layer limitations, we propose in this paper an innovative control plane that targets to optimize the global radio cellular capacity of GeRoFAN by efficiently mapping RFs onto OCs. This problem is formulated as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) with the objective to minimize the number of OCs subject to 4G cellular planning rules.