Communications of the ACM
Wired Is the New Wireless: Spreading the Web in China
Chinese researchers are developing new technology that they say revolutionizes how the Internet is distributed.
Credit: Grant Faint/Getty
Although 538 million of China's 1.3 billion people had access to the Internet as of June 2012, most of the country's population is still offline, which led Chinese researchers to develop new technology they say revolutionizes how the Internet is distributed.
The researchers combined 3G and 4G connectivity standards into one set of fiber-optic lines, called radio-over-fiber (RoF). "Our aim is to build a broadband access network using just one integrated intelligent system of radio-over-fiber and distributed antennas," says Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications researcher Kun Xu.
RoF works by encoding different types of wireless signals into a beam of light and sending them down a fiber-optic cable. All of the processing that enables Internet traffic to turn into radio signals happens at a central station, making RoF cheaper to build, run, and maintain than conventional wireless distribution networks.
"The future city will not need big, high-power cell towers, expensive coaxial cables, or repetitive network infrastructures for different wireless services," Xu says. "All the services, wired or wireless, will be supplied by this system and controlled by one central office."
From New Scientist
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Abstracts Copyright © 2012 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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