Study of a Bidirectional Ultra-Wideband Radio-over-Fiber WDM Access Network

Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) is the ultimate solution for the last-mile access networks. However, component and deployment cost will determine the accepted timing of vast end users. Before FTTH becomes a reality, a hybrid system combining the benefits of fiber access network and high-speed wireless solution, may address the issue of fiber availability by providing instant bandwidth to the end users. In recently ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless system has fixed everyone』s eyes in the field of wireless communication. Not only it provides high-data-rate in mobile communication, but also is applied in electrical fitting, which could be employed in communication and message delivered such as high-speed wireless LAN (WLAN), global positioning system (GPS), sensing network and wireless video transmission. Radio-over-fiber (ROF) network incorporating array waveguide grating (AWG) routers can provide a simple topology, easier network management, and increase capacity by allocating different wavelengths to individual base station (BS). This study presents a novel bidirectional UWB radio-over-fiber architecture based on wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON). In this architecture, UWB modulation signal is adopted the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique to achieve high data rate, low transmit power, less path loss and better immunity to multipath propagation. Gain-switched DFB lasers with AWG router is designed to combine or split several wavelengths simultaneously. Moreover, when the optical source is instead of tunable lasers (TLs), any tunable laser can individually address any BS across the physical PON at any given time. This allows for easy reconfiguration but maintains the reliability benefit of a passive field infrastructure. Because of these advantages, we expect our research of this part will lead to practical UWB radio-over-fiber access network solutions.

Project ID:PB9706-1811
External Project ID:NSC96-2628-E182-002-MY3