Transport Network Design for FrontHaul

Philippe Sehier (1) , Anne Bouillard (2, 3) , Fabien Mathieu (2, 3) , Thomas Deiss (1)

1 NOKIA Research Center
2 Nokia Bell Labs [Nozay]
3 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences

The evolution of LTE and advent of 5G networks increases further the bandwidth requirements for Radio Access Network (RAN). In parallel, the deployment of Centralized RAN architecture raises new challenges on the FrontHaul network. The inflexibility of the legacy Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) is the primary challenge to Virtualized RAN deployments, and there is currently a strong trend towards the use of packetized transport methods, together with flexible split RAN based architectures. Functional splits within the real-time functions of the RAN have very stringent requirements on latency and jitter. This paper analyzes the jitter produced in the switching nodes of the FrontHaul network, and proposes dimensioning rules.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Philippe Sehier, Anne Bouillard, Fabien Mathieu, Thomas Deiss. Transport Network Design for FrontHaul. 3rd IEEE Workshop on Next Generation Backhaul/Fronthaul Networks , Sep 2017, Toronto, Canada. ⟨hal-01615361⟩