FRIDAY

 

Fibre Radio for In-building Distributed Antenna Systems

(FRIDAY)

Chin-Pang Liu 

 

Project details

Start date: 01.06.2001
End date : 31.05.2004
Funding :  EPSRC (GR/R40371/01)
Value : £ 108,618
Partners : Remec Airtech Ltd, Agilent Technologies UK Ltd, University of Cambridge (UK)

Partners

University of Bristol (UK)

 

Description

The market for extended coverage of second generation (2G) cellular systems is becoming increasingly important to mobile network operators in application areas such as corporate office buildings, shopping centres and airports. Good coverage can only be provided in most instances using distributed antenna systems (DAS) within the building since the signal penetration from outside base stations is unreliable.

Radio over fibre is preferred for DAS due to the small size and low attenuation properties of optical fibre, which means that system design is made relatively straightforward (and therefore cheap) due to the insensitivity of signal loss as a function of cable length. The problem with today's fibre-based DAS systems is that current products for this market are designed for a single service and use expensive optoelectronic technology.

 

Objectives

 

This project seeks to overcome these limitations by exploring the use of low-cost mass-market 850nm, VCSELs and sub-carrier transmissions over pre-installed multi-mode fibre (MMF) to design and implement a low-cost, multi-service fibre-based DAS. Services to be included are GSM (0.9GHz and 1.8GHz), UMTS (2GHz) and HIPERLAN/2 (5-6GHz) to give a flexible and future-resistant system with data rates up to 54Mb/s.

This is a novel approach which stands a good chance of success, based on previous work on analogue modulation of VCSELs and high frequency, sub-carrier multiplexed (SCM) transmission over MMF (at Bristol) and multi-service radio over fibre systems (at UCL).

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