Experimental analysis of single and multiple antenna units in uplink of radio-over-fiber distributed antenna system

Increasing the number of antennas either at the transmitter or receiver has been shown to improve system reliability without occupying additional spectrum. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the error vector magnitude (EVM) of single and multiple remote antenna units (RAU) focusing on uplink transmission. We demonstrate that for 64-QAM modulation, the EVM requirement of 6.5% could be achieved with multiple separated RAUs in situations where a single RAU fails to meet this requirement. The EVM result was obtained as the transmitting device was placed at different locations in a typical office environment with OFDM signals gathered through the RAUs and brought back to a central unit for processing. The EVM results show that using multiple RAUs and an efficient signal combining technique, here, maximal ratio combining (MRC), the EVM performance could reduce by approximately 2% when the distance between the RAUs was 0.3m and further reduced by 4% and 6% when the inter-RAU distance was 2m and 4m, respectively, compared to a single RAU.