2019 Volume E102.B Issue 8 Pages 1771-1780
Denser infrastructures can reduce terminal-to-infrastructure distance and thus improve the link budget in mobile communication systems. One such infrastructure, relaying can reduce the distance between the donor evolved node B (eNB) and user equipment (UE). However, conventional relaying suffers from geographical constraints, i.e., installation site, and difficulty in simultaneous transmission and reception on the same carrier frequency. Therefore, we propose a new type of fiber-optic relaying in which the antenna facing the eNB is geographically separated from the antenna facing the UE, and the two antennas are connected by an optical fiber. This structure aims to extend coverage to heavily shadowed areas. Our primary objective is to establish a design method for the proposed fiber-optic relaying in the presence of self-interference, which is the interference between the backhaul and access links, when the backhaul and access links simultaneously operate on the same carrier frequency. In this paper, we present the performance of the fiber-optic relaying in the presence of intra- and inter-cell interferences as well as self-interference. The theoretical desired-to-undesired-signal ratio for both uplink and downlink is investigated as parameters of the optical fiber length. We demonstrate the possibility of fiber-optic relaying with simultaneous transmission and reception on the same carrier frequency for the backhaul and access links. We validate the design method for the proposed fiber-optic relay system using these results.
