Novel digital radio over fibre for 4G-LTE

Digital radio over fibre (RoF) technology has been suggested as a promising solution to replace conventional analogue RoF technology for multi-service in-building wireless coverage. However in conventional digital RoF, digitisation leads to high data rates which in turn results in high capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX). This paper investigates a novel methodology to transmit efficiently a digitised radio service over an optical link to provide wireless coverage. We demonstrate a digital processing technique that is able to compress the digitised 20MHz bandwidth Long Term Evolution (LTE) data stream to a much lower level than in a conventional link without impairing its radio performance.This work is supported by Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) via the Digital Distributed Antenna System (DDAS) project and Beijing Institute of Aerospace Control Devices (BIACD), a subsidiary institute of China Academy of Aerospace Electronics Technology (CAAET) via the Smart In-building Wireless System using Flexible Transmission Technology (SWIFT) project.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICCW.2015.724719