Abstract
This article presents an experimental demonstration of a high-capacity millimeter-wave 5G NR signal transmission with analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) fronthaul over multi-core fiber and full real-time processing. The demonstration validates the core of the blueSPACE fronthaul architecture which combines ARoF fronthaul with space division multiplexing in the optical distribution network to alleviate the fronthaul capacity bottleneck and maintain a centralized radio access network with fully centralized signal processing. The introduction of optical beamforming in the blueSPACE architecture brings true multi-beam transmission and enables full spatial control over the RF signal. The proposed ARoF architecture features a transmitter that generates the ARoF signal and an optical signal carrying a reference local oscillator employed for downconversion at the remote unit from a single RF reference at the central office. A space division multiplexing based radio access network with multi-core fibre allows parallel transport of the uplink ARoF signal and reference local oscillator at the same wavelength over separate cores. A complete description of the real-time signal processing and experimental setup is provided and system performance is evaluated. Transmission of an 800 MHz wide extended 5G NR fronthaul signal over a 7-core fibre is shown with full real-time signal processing, achieving 1.4 Gbit/s with a bit error rate <3.8times 10^{-3} and thus below the limit for hard-decision forward error correction with 7% overhead.
Highlights
The imminent introduction of fifth generation mobile networks (5G) is set to drastically alter the architecture and layout of mobile networks to satisfy the continuously rising demand for mobile data and to accommodate a whole range of novel applications with varying requirements
The latter is enabled through the use of analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF), where the analog waveforms are transported over the optical distribution networks (ODNs), possibly together with an optical local oscillator (LO) to simplify mm-wave upconversion of the signal and minimize complexity at the remote unit (RU) [10]
The blueSPACE baseband unit (BBU) mainly consists of five modules, i) the digital data interface acting as data source/sink for the digital signal processing (DSP) chains, ii) the cyclic prefix (CP) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter side DSP datapath, iii) the Cyclic prefix (CP)-OFDM receiver side DSP datapath, iv) the analog data interface towards digital to analog converter (DAC) and analog to digital converter (ADC), and v) the embedded central processing unit (CPU)
Summary
The imminent introduction of fifth generation mobile networks (5G) is set to drastically alter the architecture and layout of mobile networks to satisfy the continuously rising demand for mobile data and to accommodate a whole range of novel applications with varying requirements. The main research directions are either to partially re-distribute the processing capabilities to reduce the requirements of digitized fronthaul in terms of data rates, latency and jitter tolerance, or to increase centralization and transition to a fully analog fronthaul The latter is enabled through the use of analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF), where the analog waveforms are transported over the ODN, possibly together with an optical local oscillator (LO) to simplify mm-wave upconversion of the signal and minimize complexity at the remote unit (RU) [10]. As the temporal relation between the N output signals of the OBFN carries the beamforming information, these relations must be precisely preserved from the OBFN to the antenna array element, with the required precision determined by the RF frequency—e.g., in the case of mmwave transmission around 30 GHz, temporal relation between the beamformed signals
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