Radio-over-Fiber based architecture for seamless wireless indoor communication in the 60 GHz band

In order to satisfy the increasing demand of wireless broadband multimedia services, much attention has been paid to the 60 GHz band where as much as 5 GHz of spectrum has been reserved. However, in the indoor environment, the propagation of signals at this millimeter wave band is strongly hindered by walls, people and their movement, furniture, etc. As a result, a mobile user might experience frequent loss of connection as the user moves from one cell to another. In this paper, we propose a flexible and cost-effective Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) based network architecture to support indoor networking at millimeter wave bands. To create sufficient overlap areas between cells and thus to ensure a seamless communication environment for mobile users, the concept of Extended Cell is introduced. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture with a detailed simulation study of an indoor scenario. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of the architecture on the performance of two popular state-of-the-art protocols, namely IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16, to find which Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is suitable for RoF networks.