Performance Analysis of Non-Converged and Converged Medium Access Control Protocols for Radio-over-Fiber Networks

For supporting the upcoming applications like interactive gaming, 3D-TV, etc., a high data rate needs to be provided to the wireless mobile users. To facilitate these requirements, and to keep the mobility of the users intact, a wireless network that has an optical backbone with a huge bandwidth capacity is required. Radio-over-Fiber (RoF) networks prove to be a promising solution that can provide a high data rate along with a very low delay. In this paper, we propose a converged medium access control (MAC) protocol for RoF networks. In addition, the proposed converged MAC protocol is compared with a state-of-art non-converged MAC protocol. The simulation results show that the converged MAC protocol for RoF network offers much lower delay and high channel utilization as compared to the non-converged and hence converged RoF networks prove to be a better choice for the evolution of next generation networks.