Analog Radio Over Fiber Aided C-RAN: Optical Aided Beamforming for Multi-User Adaptive MIMO Design

Given the increasing demand for high data-rate, high-performance wireless communications services, the demand on the radio access networks (RAN) has been increasing significantly, where optical fiber has been widely used both for the backhaul and fronthaul. Additionally, advances in signal processing such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques, have improved the performance as well as transmission rate of communications networks. Beamforming has been used as an efficient MIMO technique for providing a signal to noise ratio (SNR) gain as well as reducing the multi-user interference. However, beamforming requires the employment of phase-shifters, which suffers from reduced phase resolutions, degraded noise figures as well as beam-squinting in addition to the implementation challenges. Hence, in this paper we employ an analogue radio over fiber (A-RoF) aided architecture for supporting the requirements of the current and future mobile networks, where we design a photonics aided beamforming technique in order to eliminate the bulky electronic phase-shifters and the beam-squinting effect, while also providing a low-cost RAN solution. Additionally, this photonics aided beamforming is combined with a reconfigurable multi-user MIMO technique, where users can communicate with one or multiple remote radio heads (RRHs), while employing stand-alone beamforming, beamforming combined with diversity or with multiplexing depending on the available resources and the user channel information as well as the quality of service requirements.