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 costeffective 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), Qualityfactor (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 SCMOFDM systems is more superior operating at a 10 Gbps data rate when compared to the 5 Gbps data rate.