Title: Radio-over-fiber for increasing effective coverage of motorway access networks

Authors: Weixi Xing, Yue Li, Xuan Huan Nguyen, Jun Zheng

Addresses: Wireless Communication Research Laboratory (WCRL), Institute of Advanced Telecommunications Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. ' Wireless Communication Research Laboratory (WCRL), Institute of Advanced Telecommunications Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. ' Wireless Communication Research Laboratory (WCRL), Institute of Advanced Telecommunications Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, UK. ' School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Street Ottawa, Ontario K1N 6N5, Canada

Abstract: This paper proposes a radio-over-fiber (RoF) system architecture for a motorway access network to provide broadband communication for high-speed vehicles. The proposed system architecture employs a star-tree topology with a central control system connected to the fixed-line data collection parts on one side and the wireless access points (APs) on the other side to transmit data information from/to road vehicles. To address the coverage problem, a motor-picocell scheme (MPS) is proposed, which converts a conventional base station (BS) into a number of picocells and deploy the picocells along a motorway based on the combination of RoF and TDMA technologies. To improve the performance of the proposed system architecture, a cross-layer design is also proposed based on joint adaptive modulation (AM) and buffer management. In the cross-layer design, the AM scheme adapted to the channel quality can result in different transmission rate at the transmitter side and packet error rate at the receiver side, and the jointly-designed buffer management scheme with an optimal threshold can achieve the best utilisation of the network.

Keywords: radio over fibre; coverage; RoF; motorway access networks; broadband communication; high-speed vehicles; wireless networks; cross-layer design; joint adaptive modulation; buffer management; vehicle communication systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2009.022338

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2009 Vol.2 No.2/3, pp.331 - 351

Published online: 01 Jan 2009 *

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