Efficient Bandwidth Allocation and Hand off Management in Radio over Fiber Systems

Radio over Fiber system provides high bandwidth upto 1Gbps to the wireless nodes using millimeter waveband technologies. The use of high frequency puts alimit on the size of the cell thus introducing theconcept of Micro and Pico cells. The more number ofcells in the network give rise to the increased numberof hand offs. The challenges faced to such RoFsystems are the efficient hand off with zero hand overdropping and the efficient allocation of bandwidthamong the different base stations. RoF systemarchitecture frees the base station from the processingoverhead of MAC layer and shift it to a centralcontrolling entity for base stations, called controllingstation or Central station (CS). Our proposed solutiongives the methodology for the efficient allocation ofbandwidth to the base stations along with dynamicformation of Virtual Cellular Zones (VCZs) based onthe bandwidth requirement in a cell area. We havedevised a method for the dynamic allocation ofbandwidth to the base stations and their addition andremoval from the VCZs in order to provide morebandwidth to the user congested areas andminimizing the number of hand offs. The additionsand modifications are suggested at CS and MAClayer for the hand off occurring between base stationscontrolled by two different CS