Performance Increase for Highly-Loaded RoF Access Networks

This letter presents a medium access control (MAC) mechanism that allows for the effective use of the bandwidth of highly loaded 60 GHz Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) networks. We extend a previous approach proposed in the literature which is shown to have problems in highly-loaded cases. We propose a protocol that makes use of a memory buffer at the Central Office (CO) at the providers side that allows for the reduction of the number of polling packets required to identify all the active wireless nodes that need to transmit data. This greatly increases the overall throughput of the network at a maximum percentage of 42% for the examined configurations. The high throughput provided by our proposal is achieved without the need to update current infrastructure and only needs a trivial amount of memory at the provider´s side.