Abstract
The article analyzes the total cost of ownership (TCO) of 5G fronthauling solutions based on analog and digital radio-over-fiber (RoF) architectures in cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). The capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX, OPEX) are assessed, for a 10-year period, considering three different RoF techniques: intermediate frequency analog RoF (IF-A-RoF), digital signal processing (DSP) assisted analog RoF (DSP-A-RoF), and digital RoF (D-RoF) based on the common public radio interface (CPRI) specifications. The greenfield deployment scenario under exam includes both fiber trenching (FT) and fiber leasing (FL) options. The TCO is assessed while varying (i) the number of aggregated subcarriers, (ii) the number of three-sector antennas located at the base station, and (iii) the mean fiber-hop length. The comparison highlights the significance that subcarrier aggregation has on the cost efficiency of the analog RoF solutions. In addition, the analysis details the contribution of each cost category to the overall CAPEX and OPEX values. The obtained results indicate that subcarrier aggregation via DSP results in high cost efficiency for a mobile fronthaul network, while a CPRI-based architecture together with FL brings the highest OPEX value.
Highlights
The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks sets high goals in terms of scalability, reliability and energy efficiency
It is assumed that 32 subcarriers with 100 MHz bandwidth are aggregated at each remote radio unit (RRU) before being transmitted over the mobile fronthaul (MFH) network where the mean fiber-hop length is 0.5 km
The results show that digital RoF (D-RoF) presents the highest CAPEX when compared to intermediate frequency (IF)-analog RoF (A-RoF) and digital signal processing (DSP)-A-RoF if fiber trenching (FT) is used for a greenfield deployment
Summary
The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks sets high goals in terms of scalability, reliability and energy efficiency. Meeting these requirements at a reasonable cost entails significant technological advances in both the wireless and the optical transport segments These two technologies must be seamlessly integrated to leverage on the complementary advantages that each segment presents (i.e., huge bandwidth, long range and low maintenance on the optical side, high mobility and ubiquity on the wireless side). The result of this integration is a hybrid Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) network infrastructure [4].
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