LTE smart grid performance gains with additional remote antenna units via radio over fiber using a microring resonator system

Smart grid (SG) systems form the backbone of various services that provide comfort and efficiency enhancements. Increasing numbers of SG users cause additional demands by applications on the SG, and this trend eventually leads to the SG being unable to deliver services with sufficient quality. A system of optical and wireless access technologies, namely radio over fiber (RoF), is proposed here for adoption in SG systems (SG-RoF) in order to ensure provision of adequate capacity in line with transmission bandwidth service requirements. This paper details a microring resonator (MRR) system for use in SG-RoF systems, whereby the extra optical carriers are generated so as to increase the number of serviceable remote antenna units (RAUs). A number of very useful and widely used smart grid applications, namely video surveillances and advanced metering data, are also described in the context of the SG-RoF. The performance of well-known algorithms, such as proportional fairness, modified largest weighted delay first, exponential proportional fairness and exponential rule, are evaluated in this work to determine the optimal candidate for use in the proposed system.