Optical transmission performance of a Radio-over-Fiber system for wireless LAN

Radio-over-fiber (RoF) technology has been identified as a technique to increase the capacity of wireless data networks. The opportunity to install vast networks coupled with the possibility of designing simple and cost-effective base stations has gained extremely good reviews for RoF technology. This paper investigates the use of a RoF network to transport IEEE802.11a Wireless LAN signals. Individual optical link components were modeled and integrated with an existing 802.11a physical layer Matlab model [4] to simulate a RoF link used to transport 802.11a WLAN signals. The simulations conducted were aimed towards studying the performance of the RoF link with respect to the power level requirements of optical modulation and demodulation for acceptable transmission bit-error-rates.