A 60 GHz Wireless Home Area Network With Radio Over Fiber Repeaters

Abstract

Home area networks will have to deal with the future multigigabit wireless systems that are emerging or are under development . These millimeter-wave radio systems achieve data rates up to several Gb/s per channel, but over short distance. So, to expand the radio coverage, we propose to introduce a radio-over-fiber (RoF) infrastructure at home. This paper presents a complete study of a RoF system: the 60 GHz radio coverage is extended using a RoF link working at intermediate frequency with two hops in the air. An experimental setup of such an infrastructure has been realized and characterized. A low-cost solution, working at 850 nm, was chosen using multimode fiber and off-the-shelf millimeter-wave and photonic components. Finally, a real-time transmission between two commercial WirelessHD devices working at 3 Gb/s has been carried out.