Adaptive Digitization and Variable Channel Coding for Enhancement of Compressed Digital Mobile Fronthaul in PAM-4 Optical Links

Abstract

The standardization and development of LTE-A and 5G introduced advanced wireless technologies including multiple-input multiple-output and carrier aggregation, which require multiple wireless carriers to be delivered to and from each remote radio head. The common public radio interface (CPRI) as the mainstream standard in mobile fronthaul (MFH) with on-off-keying-based optical links cannot fulfill the capacity and efficiency requirement. Instead, using compressed CPRI in a high-speed pulse-amplitude-modulation-4 (PAM-4) link is actively researched and demonstrated. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate adaptive digitization and channel coding based on these compression and capacity boosting technologies. Depending on the optical link condition, the digitization bits and channel coding rates can be adaptively and dynamically changed to achieve the lowest error vector magnitude (EVM) of wireless carriers. By separating digitization bits into high bits and low bits, the coding overhead can be different between groups, while still keeping the same bit rate per wireless carrier. Based on the existing digital MFH infrastructure, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the capacity and sensitivity in the PAM-4-based compressed digital MFH. Capacity gains from 30% to 68%, sensitivity improvement of 2–9 dB, and significant EVM improvements are demonstrated experimentally, comparing with other compressed CPRI MFH solutions.