Impact of Remote Radio Head on 5G Open-RAN Technology

Abstract

5G supports enhanced Mobile broadband (eMBB), massive Machine type communication (mMTC), and ultra-Reliable low latency communication (uRLLC). The 5G technology promises superior network performance but poses a threat to its economic success. The cost of upgrading 5G handsets and 5G infrastructure is quite high. The 4G mobile network used integrated hardware and software Radio access network (RAN) which became a single manufacturer proprietary item. Manufacturers and operators needed to trade off between cost and complexity for 5G RAN. Opening up the RAN brings a new entrants and reduce the total cost of ownership. Open-RAN (ORAN) is an evolved version of traditional RAN where it undergoes multiple stages of disaggregation of its components. The Remote Radio Head (RRH) and Base Band Unit (BBU) was the first level of disintegration. The BBU further disintegrated into Distributed units (DU) and the Centralized Units (CU). The DU and CU further updated into Open-DU and Open-CU connected via the F1-interface and controlled by the RAN Intelligence Controller (RIC). The Remote Radio Head (RRH) is further modified to Open Radio Unit (O-RU). In this paper the basic RRH/O-RU architecture of the Open RAN specified by the ORAN Alliance is implemented and evaluated in the noisy environment, and compared Bit Error Rate (BER) for different fading models added to the environment noise.