Spectral Efficiency Comparison Between Analog and Digital RoF for Mobile Fronthaul Transmission Link

Abstract

Mobile fronthaul requires an efficient transfer of radio signals between cell-site remote radio heads (RRHs) and a centralized baseband unit (BBU) to satisfy diverse requirements on system capacity, latency, and cost. Both analog radio-over-fiber (A-RoF) and digital radio-over-fiber (D-RoF) enable the realization of the mobile fronthaul transmission link. A-RoF can achieve high spectral efficiency while it is susceptible to the noise and inherent nonlinearities during the optical transmission. Nevertheless, D-RoF can achieve high signal fidelity by using high quantization bits while it is commonly considered as low spectral efficiency. Therefore, the spectral efficiency comparison between D-..