Experimental analysis of single and multiple antenna units in uplink of radio-over-fiber distributed antenna system

Increasing the number of antennas either at the transmitter or receiver has been shown to improve system reliability without occupying additional spectrum. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the error vector magnitude (EVM) of single and multiple remote antenna units (RAU) focusing on uplink transmission. We demonstrate that for 64-QAM modulation, the EVM requirement of 6.5% could be achieved with multiple separated RAUs in situations where a single RAU fails to meet this requirement. The EVM result was obtained as the transmitting device was placed at different locations in a typical office environment with OFDM signals gathered through the RAUs and brought back to a central unit for processing. The EVM results show that using multiple RAUs and an efficient signal combining technique, here, maximal ratio combining (MRC), the EVM performance could reduce by approximately 2% when the distance between the RAUs was 0.3m and further reduced by 4% and 6% when the inter-RAU distance was 2m and 4m, respectively, compared to a single RAU

Capacity and Error Performance Verification of Multi-Antenna Schemes in Radio-over-Fiber Distributed Antenna System

A radio-over-fiber distributed antenna system permits larger physical separation between antennas in a wireless system’s infrastructure; this investigation verifies that improved performance – lower error rates and higher capacities – can thus be achieved. In this paper, specific single-input multiple-output (SIMO), multiple-input single-output (MISO) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) algorithms are compared in an experimental radio over fiber system, using user-defined processing functions for the signals. It is shown that significantly reduced symbol error rate (SER) and modestly increased capacity is achieved for a wireless 1x2 SIMO uplink using the maximal ratio combining (MRC) processing algorithm and 2x1 MISO downlink using the Alamouti space time block coding (STBC) scheme. Further, SER is reduced for a downlink 2x2 wireless MIMO using the zero-forcing algorithm while, most importantly, greatly increased capacity is achieved through the spatial multiplexing gain

Performance of MIMO Schemes in Radio-over-fibre-based Distributed Antenna System

The research presented in this thesis has focused on the use of MIMO wireless communications in a RoF-based DAS to improve wireless coverage and capacity performance in an indoor environment. The aim is to analyse the practical issues that cause throughput to deteriorate when commercial MIMO APs are used in a RoF-DAS, and also to verify that improved performance - lower error rates and higher capacities - can be achieved by a large physical separation between the RAUs when specific multi-antenna scheme algorithms are used. The performance of an IEEE 802.11n MIMO-supported AP and IEEE 802.11g spatial-diversity-supported AP are investigated in a RoF-DAS when different fibre lengths are connecting the AP in the central unit to the RAUs, and when the RAUs are widely separated. The analysis indicates that for MIMO, the throughput drops rapidly due to severe ISI caused by differential delay when the fibre-length difference exceeds a certain distance, while for spatial diversity high throughputs can be maintained even at large fibre-length difference. Further, it was observed that largely separated RAU may lead to power imbalances and the throughput drops in specific wireless user's positions when the received power imbalance was above 12-15dB for MIMO-supported AP, while for spatial-diversity-supported AP the power imbalance does not affect the throughput. The majority of previous works on RoF-DAS for improving MIMO systems were based on commercial products and the specific algorithms used within these products are unknown. An investigation was carried out at microwave frequency with SIMO algorithms in RoF-DAS uplink, MISO and MIMO algorithms in RoF-DAS downlink, and compared with the performance of a SISO system. This investigation was later extended to millimetre-wave frequency where larger bands of frequency are available enabling the possibility of wider bandwidth and higher data rates. The result shows significantly reduced error rate and modestly increased capacity for a wireless 1x2 SIMO uplink using MRC algorithm and 2x1 MISO downlink using Alamouti STBC algorithm. Also, error rate was reduced for a wireless 2x2 MIMO downlink using the zero-forcing algorithm while, most importantly, greatly increased capacity was achieved through the spatial multiplexing gain