Radio over Fiber for Wireless Communications: From Fundamentals to Advanced Topics

Foreword

Just consider how much our lives today are influenced by wireless and mobile communication technologies: from synchronized calendars to emails on the go, from simply browsing the Internet to uploading high-definition videos and photos taken with mobile phones to Facebook, from accessing maps and navigation advice to being entertained with high-definition television and videos; smart phones with mobile and Wi-Fi enable us to live our lives to their full potential. As this mobile data consumption grows and more and more machines and devices begin to incorporate the same communication platforms to achieve high-bandwidth communication via wireless channels, the networks that provide connectivity need to change by first providing more bandwidth to more users over ever growing geographic areas. The combined effect of growing data bandwidth and the ever-growing number of devices is poised to create a massive challenge in designing, building, and operating future broadband wireless access networks. Reducing the coverage of mobile networks to form small cells, shifting the carrier frequency of radio communications to high frequencies to be able to offer more bandwidths to users, and providing broadband back-haul from base stations are all needed to address this challenge. Radio over fiber (ROF) technology provides a promising technique to combine the advantage of wireless connectivity of a broadband wireless link over short distances with the bandwidth abundance of optical fiber ...