Cost Analysis of 5G Fronthaul Networks Through Functional Splits at the PHY Layer in a Capacity and Cost Limited Scenario
| Autor: | Rakibul Islam Rony, Elena Lopez-Aguilera, Eduard Garcia-Villegas |
|---|---|
| Přispěvatelé: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Doctorat en Enginyeria Telemàtica, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Enginyeria Telemàtica, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. WNG - Grup de xarxes sense fils |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
General Computer Science
Computer science Distributed computing Transport network fronthaul 02 engineering and technology Base station 020210 optoelectronics & photonics Comunicacions mòbils Sistemes de CRAN 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Wireless PHY layer General Materials Science TOC Electrical and Electronic Engineering Radio access network business.industry backhaul General Engineering Physical layer 020206 networking & telecommunications Fronthaul functional splits lcsh:Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering Mobile communication systems business lcsh:TK1-9971 5G Heterogeneous network Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Processament del senyal::Processament del senyal en les telecomunicacions [Àrees temàtiques de la UPC] |
| Zdroj: | IEEE Access, Vol 9, Pp 8733-8750 (2021) UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| ISSN: | 2169-3536 |
| DOI: | 10.1109/access.2021.3049636 |
| Popis: | © 2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The expected growth in carried traffic and the added complexity of different deployment approaches (distributed vs. centralized), showing different requirements, make transport network one of the main design challenges in 5G. One of those challenges is posed by the Centralized Radio Access Network (CRAN) paradigm, whereby different functionalities of the base station are split between a central unit and a remote unit, both connected by a fronthaul/midhaul network. When this centralization includes physical layer functions, stringent capacity and delay constraints are imposed on the fronthaul, thus making its design and deployment more challenging and costly. At this point, the anticipated capacity requirements for fronthaul links are enormous and, as of today, no single technology can support such requirements. Hence, the complex transport network will be heterogeneous in nature. There is consensus in following two approaches to tackle the fronthaul challenge: i) building a heterogeneous network by combining different technologies; and ii) employing different functional splits, which have the potential to reduce the capacity requirements on fronthaul links. Hence, it is important that we exploit different potential technologies and a functional split approach for 5G fronthaul networks design. As our contribution, we show how intelligently selected functional splits at physical layer can be utilized to serve the radio access networks in a capacity-limited scenario. From a different point of view, we also propose maximizing the centralization by means of a heterogeneous combination of functional splits in a budget-limited scenario. Results presented in this paper show that the combination of functional splits has the potential to enable the design of heterogeneous fronthaul networks combining wireless and wired links, and reducing drastically both the required capacity (to 40%) and the total cost of ownership (to 35%). This work was supported in part by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (5GAuRA) under Grant 675806, and in part by the Secretaria d’Universitats i Recerca del Departament d’Empresa i Coneixement from the Generalitat de Catalunya under Grant 2017 SGR 376. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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