Coverage Range and Cost Comparison of Remote Antenna Unit Designs for In-building Radio over Fiber Technology

Future communication needs to be ubiquitous, broadband, convergent, and seamless. Radio over fiber (RoF) technology is one of the most important enabler in access network for the technologies. Adoption of RoF faces bottleneck in optoelectronics, that they are still expensive, high power consumption, and limited in bandwidth. To solve the problem, transceiver in remote antenna unit (RAU) is developed, i.e. electroabsorption transceiver (EAT) and asymmetric Fabry-Perot modulator (AFPM). This paper compares their coverage range and cost in providing WCDMA and WLAN services. Needed gain of RF amplifier for supporting picocell is also discussed.