Abstract
We present an agile and medium-transparent Medium Access Control (MT-MAC)
protocol for seamless and dynamic capacity allocation over both optical and
wireless transmission media in 60 GHz broadband Radio-Over-Fiber (RoF)
networks. Medium transparency is achieved by means of parallelism between
two simultaneously running contention periods and through nesting of
wireless user-specific dataframes within Remote Antenna Unit (RAU)-specific
optical Superframes. The first contention period reports on the traffic
requesting RAUs and decides about the wavelength assignments, whereas the
second contention period arbitrates traffic between wireless clients served
by the same RAU. Seamless service delivery is completed by RAU-dedicated
optical Superframes, each one incorporating multiple user-specific and
time-division multiplexed dataframes that are opto-electronically converted
at the RAU site and get transmitted wirelessly down to each end-user. The
proposed MAC protocol is demonstrated to operate successfully both in
RoF-over-bus as well as in RoF-over-Passive Optical Network (PON)
architectures requiring only minor variations for getting adapted to the
network topology. Its performance for both network topologies is evaluated
through simulations for different number of end-users, different loads and
network node densities and for bit-rates up to 3 Gb/s, both for a Poisson
and for a burst-mode traffic model. Successful operation is demonstrated for
all different cases, confirming its agility and showing that extended range
60 GHz LAN areas between wireless users even without line of sight
conditions can be obtained. Moreover, the high throughput and low latency
values for non-saturated network conditions reveal its potential for
transforming broadband 60 GHz picocellular networks into highly effective
RoF-enabled 60 GHz Wireless LANs even for high-bandwidth and time-sensitive
applications like High-Definition video streaming.
© 2010 IEEE
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