The constant increasing demand for higher bandwidth services from subscribers has led to the integration of optical network infrastructure and wireless broadband access. Combining the capacity of optical fiber with the flexibility and mobility of wireless networks, a powerful system can be created to support data traffic volumes on demand. The radio over fiber system is the most used solution to integrate radio and fiber technologies. However, the analog links decrease linearly with the increasing length due to distortions from optical link. On the other hand, digitized radio transmission minimizes the physical impairments and can maintain its dynamic range independent from the fiber’s transmission length. Nevertheless, the optical link requires a high bandwidth due to the digitalization process, which from the implementation point of view represents one of the major challenges. This new context will change the network infrastructure and has forced operators to embrace solutions to improve the capacity of the system, mainly in radio access network (RAN). A new concept of RAN, called Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) is gaining great interest because this architecture improves the fixed/mobile convergence. In comparison with a classic architecture, this comes out with an innovative architecture where all complex functionalities are executed in the central office (CO), while the base station (BS) is responsible for executing less complex functions which bring reduced costs, improved performance and fixed/mobile convergence. Based on this information, this thesis proposal aims to investigate the radio over fiber scenarios as a solution to provide real access networks. In order to meet this goal, first we intending to investigate architectures by simulations, after we want replay the proposed followed by experimental demos in more realistic scenarios.
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