Novel digital radio over fibre for 4G-LTE

Digital radio over fibre (RoF) technology has been suggested as a promising solution to replace conventional analogue RoF technology for multi-service in-building wireless coverage. However in conventional digital RoF, digitisation leads to high data rates which in turn results in high capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX). This paper investigates a novel methodology to transmit efficiently a digitised radio service over an optical link to provide wireless coverage. We demonstrate a digital processing technique that is able to compress the digitised 20MHz bandwidth Long Term Evolution (LTE) data stream to a much lower level than in a conventional link without impairing its radio performance.