Effective Indoor Coverage via Radio-Over-Cable Fronthauls: Analog Fronthauls Come of Age

This article considers a radio-over-cable (RoC)based analog link on a local area network (LAN) cable [e.g., category (CAT) 5] as the last hop of the fronthaul for indoor mobile service coverage. We first present state-of-the-art mobile systems with RoC-based fronthauls and then discuss a number of critical issues regarding real implementation. These issues include the function module, called the <italic>radio-cable access unit</italic> (RCU), that interfaces with the radio frequency (RF) and intermediate frequency (IF) signals along the LAN cable as well as the design of an RF front end (RF-FE) that supports time-division duplex (TDD) and frequency-division duplex (FDD) modes. Then, the proposed nonconfigurable distributed antenna unit (NC-DAU) and corresponding resource-mapping scheme [NC air-tocable (NC-A2C)] are introduced, aiming to achieve lowcost, large-scale indoor deployment. We examine the performance of the NC-A2C and compare it with the optimal case.