Performance evaluation of a scm-ofdm radio over fiber system for the mobile fronthaul

Abstract

The exponential growth in mobile data traffic caused by the upsurge of Internet users has led to a high demand of capacity on the mobile data networks. High capacity and high data rate requirements created an emergence of Radio over Fiber (RoF) technology which is a possible key in the provision of high bandwidth and cost-effective fronthaul solutions. This paper presents an evaluation on the integration of Subcarrier Multiplexing (SCM) with RoF and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technologies to enhance the system capacities. A 4-channel SCM-OFDM architecture combined with RoF technology is examined across three different modulation schemes (i.e., 256-QAM, 64-QAM and 16-QAM) for transmission distances from 10 km to 120 km for two data rates i.e., (5 and 10) Gbps. The performance of the architectures is measured by Bit-error rate (BER), Quality-factor (Q-factor), Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), Error Vector Magnitude (EVM), Eye-Opening Penalty (EOP), received power and of transmitted signals. The simulation results indicates that the SCM-OFDM model at a 10 Gbps data rate gives a better performance under the 256-QAM modulation scheme. Furthermore the performance of all the SCM-OFDM systems is more superior operating at a 10 Gbps data rate when compared to the 5 Gbps data rate.