FIBER OPTIC INFRASTRUCTURE FOR WIRELESS COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

It is clear that to meet the new demands of wireless customers, conventional cellular service providers and upcoming Personal Communication Service (PCS) providers for conventional phone service and high bandwidth wireless LAN must upgrade their networks to provide complete radio coverage. This evolution has motivated the need for low-cost systems that transport radio signals to and from areas of poor signal coverage. The most important area where this problem must be solved is inside of buildings, since this is where people spend most of their time. Unfortunately, the in-building environment is also the most challenging area to provide radio coverage due to severe attenuation and multi-path effects. The problem must be tackled from the viewpoint of optimization of performance/cost ratio of the network. In this paper, we describe a system-level approach to tackle this problem. We demonstrate how one can trade-off hardware performance, which represent cost, with proper choice of system architecture which includes, among other factors, in-building radio environment, to arrive at an optimum network solution technically and economically.