Radio over Fiber (RoF) techniques have been long recognized as the promising solution for indoor networking at millimeter-wave bands. We discuss the possible deployment scenarios of an RoF network for indoor environment. In this paper, we try to find the answer to the question as to which Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is suitable for an RoF network.
To substantiate our claims, performance analysis of two popular MAC protocols employing RoF - IEEE 802.11 representing the distributed control protocol family and ETSI HiperLAN/2 representing the centralized family - is presented. We show that RoF techniques can be applied to both protocols. We also show that the centralized control protocol is an appropriate candidate for RoF networks. This study is expected to contribute to the speedy deployment of RoF for indoor network deployment.