Study the performance of OFDM radio over fiber for wireless communication systems

Radio-over-fiber (ROF) technology has several advantages such as providing huge bandwidth, inherent immunity to electromagnetic interference and reduced power consumption. This paper presents a simulation to investigate the performance of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as a modulation technique to transmit the basebands signal over fiber. The model contains a laser diode used as optical modulator to convert the signal from baseband to optical frequency. The QPSK-OFDM transmitted signal and power spectrum are obtained for both of AWGN and optical fiber link channels. The study reveals that the OFDM performance on the optical fiber link in terms of spectrum containment is nearly similar to that on AWGN channel. The significance of this study comes from the promising future of using optical fibers to transmit radio signal. Consequently the model of this paper can be used with different wireless communication systems such as wireless LANs and digital video broadcasting (DVB) and it is supporting to the 4th generation cellular systems. The details of design and simulated results for the proposed model are presented and discussed.