Experimental Evaluation of Remote Beamforming Scheme with Fixed Wavelength Allocation in IF-over-Fiber Systems

Abstract

Radio over fiber (RoF) technology, especially intermediate frequency over fiber (IFoF), is attracting much attention as one way to realize high frequency band systems. Such systems require beamforming to attain the desired link budget. Furthermore, highly accurate beamforming permits the adoption of space division multiplexing (SDM), with its greater system capacity. Since beamforming should be controlled by the central station to achieve simple base stations, we proposed a novel remote beamforming scheme with fixed wavelength allocation. This paper introduces experiments conducted on modulated signals to evaluate the characteristics of the scheme’s beamforming gain and signal to interference ratio (SIR).