Cognitive Radio Over Fibre: Potential advantages for spectrum management

Radio over fibre (RoF) techniques [1] have been researched from many years and although there are numerous deployments world-wide, the technology is still to have a major impact on mainstream wireless and cellular networks [2]. To date the offerings of the major vendors such as Andrew, ADC and Zinwave, have focused on what are essentially distributed antenna systems. However, as this paper will explore, once the radio processing for a large number of cells is centralised there is the possibility to take advantage of advanced network and spectrum management functions that would not be available in a network of distributed equipment. In particular this paper looks at how radio-over-fibre technologies might support cognitive radio techniques to provide flexible and dynamic spectrum management.