Performance Analysis of Radio over Fiber (RoF) System for Indoor Applications

Radio over Fiber (RoF) Systems have the unique characteristic of featuring both a fiber optic link and a free space radio path. It finds extensive use in the indoor wireless market. The range requirements and ideal choice of laser for indoor usage of RoF systems have been identified in this paper. A novel architecture has been proposed for indoor application, which provides several important benefits in terms of design, installation, and operation of the systems used. This architecture is very much useful in meeting the increasing demands of user bandwidth. In this network, a central station (CS) was connected to numerous Radio Access Points (RAP) using an optical fiber to facilitate indoor connection. The indoor RF front end consisted of the following- a photodiode, a bandpass filter, a power amplifier and an antenna operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. Sparameter measured data from factory data sheets were used for modeling the RF front end components. Indoor picocells were used having power capacity lower than 1 Watt (30 dBm) and a service range of about 100 metres. The operating gain of the system was calculated with the aforementioned configuration.