Ultra Wide Band over fibre transparent architecture for High Bit-rate Home Networks

Bandwidth hungry services are developing rapidly in home networking and needs for Gigabit Home Networks will appear shortly, following the introduction of Gigabit optical access networks. In addition, ubiquitous wireless connectivity is required by users to connect multiple multimedia devices inside the home. Some wireless standards, such as Ultra Wide Band (UWB), are able to provide Gbit/s data rate but with a limited coverage. In order to extend this coverage, we propose a multipoint to multipoint (MP2MP) radio over fibre (RoF) architecture based on a NxN optical splitter. The UWB MAC layer is able to control the system and no optical MAC layer is required, so that the optical path becomes a "transparent tunnel". Simulations and experimental investigations demonstrate the technical feasibility of this innovative MP2MP RoF architecture.