Fiber Aided Wireless Network Architecture: A SISO wireless-optical channel∗

We introduce the concept of a fiber aided wireless network architecture (FAWNA), which allows high-speed mobile connectivity by leveraging the speed of optical networks. As a first step towards designing such network architectures, we consider a single-input, single-output (SISO) wirelessoptical communication link. This link consists of a wireless channel and a fiber optic channel, connected to each other by a wireless-optical interface. We propose a scheme where the received signal at the wireless-optical interface is quantized before being sent over the fiber. The achievable rate for this scheme approaches the SISO capacity exponentially with fiber capacity. We show that for fixed fiber capacity, there is an optimal wireless bandwidth of operation when our scheme is used. The wireless-optical interface has low complexity and does not require knowledge of the transmitter code book. Moreover, the loss in “soft” information, due to quantization, goes to 0 asymptotically with increase in fiber capacity. These properties make our scheme extendable to FAWNAs with large number of transmitters, radio-optic converters, variable rates, changing channel conditions and node positions.