Rethinking of Optical Transport Network Design for 5G/6G Mobile Communication

Driven by the increasing use of emerging smart mobile applications, mobile technology is continuously and rapidly advancing towards the next generation communication systems such as 5G and 6G. However, the transport network, which needs to provide low latency and reliable connectivity between hundreds of thousands of cell sites and the network core, has not advanced at the same pace. This article provides insight into how we can solve the fundamental challenges of implementing cost-optimal transport and 5G and beyond mobile networks simultaneously while satisfying the network and user requirements irrespective of the radio access network\u27s architecture

A Distributed Approach for Networked Flying Platform Association with Small Cells in 5G+ Networks

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.Comment: Submitted to IEEE GLOBECOM 2017, 7 pages and 4 figure

Optical Transport Network Design for 5G Fixed Wireless Access

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile technology, 5G is anticipated to be a significant leap in the evolution of mobile communication. 5G will be designed to attain 1000 times higher data volumes, 10 times lower latency, and 100 times more connected devices than its predecessor, 4G. Due to 5Gs ability to sustain high bandwidth per unit area, 5G is considered to be a cost-efficient solution to provide fixed wireless access (FWA) to households on a large scale. FWA is seen as an attractive alternative for fixed broadband access in scenarios where last mile access based on wired technologies is not economically viable. While approaches for enhancing user experience in a 5G FWA environment are investigated in the research community, the problem of providing cost-effective high capacity transport for FWA deployments still remains a major challenge. This is particularly challenging due to diverse transport network architectures and requirements imposed by different 5G deployment models. This paper addresses this problem by formulating a generalized joint-optimization framework to simultaneously plan wireless access and optical transport for 5G FWA networks in order to minimize the deployment cost while meeting various network requirements. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework by applying it to a real scenario with a range of deployment options and where different types of optical x-haul solutions are considered. The results provide a cornerstone for deployment strategies that will be imperative for realizing a future-proof and cost-effective broadband access network

Network Planning for Dual Residential-Business Exploitation of Next-Generation Passive Optical Networks to Provide Symmetrical 1 Gb/s Services

Demand for high-speed access for business and residential subscribers has grown rapidly in recent years; thus, service providers need to offer cost-effective solutions to cover this demand. Convergence within the same infrastructure for clients requiring different service levels may have benefits in terms of cost, but their respective service-level specifications need to be guaranteed. This article compares different flavors of next-generation passive optical networks (PONs), namely, gigabit PON (GPON), 10-gigabit PON (XG-PON), time and wavelength division multiplexing PON (TWDM-PON), and wavelength division multiplexing PON (WDM-PON), and evaluates which one can provide 1 Gb/s symmetrical service at the more affordable cost when there is a mix of residential and business subscribers. Results show that the recommended technology depends on the percentage of business subscribers in the scenario.The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Spanish projects CRAMnet (grant no. TEC2012-38362-C03-01), Elastic Networks (grant no. TEC2015-71932-REDT), TIGRE-5CM (grant no. S2013/ICE-2919), and Fed4FIRE EU Project 318389 for the development of this work. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinion of the authors’ employers, specifically in terms of architectural and engineering design or experience.European Community's Seventh Framework Progra

An Innovative RAN Architecture for Emerging Heterogeneous Networks: The Road to the 5G Era

The global demand for mobile-broadband data services has experienced phenomenal growth over the last few years, driven by the rapid proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones and tablets. This growth is expected to continue unabated as mobile data traffic is predicted to grow anywhere from 20 to 50 times over the next 5 years. Exacerbating the problem is that such unprecedented surge in smartphones usage, which is characterized by frequent short on/off connections and mobility, generates heavy signaling traffic load in the network signaling storms . This consumes a disproportion amount of network resources, compromising network throughput and efficiency, and in extreme cases can cause the Third-Generation (3G) or 4G (long-term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A)) cellular networks to crash. As the conventional approaches of improving the spectral efficiency and/or allocation additional spectrum are fast approaching their theoretical limits, there is a growing consensus that current 3G and 4G (LTE/LTE-A) cellular radio access technologies (RATs) won\u27t be able to meet the anticipated growth in mobile traffic demand. To address these challenges, the wireless industry and standardization bodies have initiated a roadmap for transition from 4G to 5G cellular technology with a key objective to increase capacity by 1000Ã? by 2020 . Even though the technology hasn\u27t been invented yet, the hype around 5G networks has begun to bubble. The emerging consensus is that 5G is not a single technology, but rather a synergistic collection of interworking technical innovations and solutions that collectively address the challenge of traffic growth. The core emerging ingredients that are widely considered the key enabling technologies to realize the envisioned 5G era, listed in the order of importance, are: 1) Heterogeneous networks (HetNets); 2) flexible backhauling; 3) efficient traffic offload techniques; and 4) Self Organizing Networks (SONs). The anticipated solutions delivered by efficient interworking/ integration of these enabling technologies are not simply about throwing more resources and /or spectrum at the challenge. The envisioned solution, however, requires radically different cellular RAN and mobile core architectures that efficiently and cost-effectively deploy and manage radio resources as well as offload mobile traffic from the overloaded core network. The main objective of this thesis is to address the key techno-economics challenges facing the transition from current Fourth-Generation (4G) cellular technology to the 5G era in the context of proposing a novel high-risk revolutionary direction to the design and implementation of the envisioned 5G cellular networks. The ultimate goal is to explore the potential and viability of cost-effectively implementing the 1000x capacity challenge while continuing to provide adequate mobile broadband experience to users. Specifically, this work proposes and devises a novel PON-based HetNet mobile backhaul RAN architecture that: 1) holistically addresses the key techno-economics hurdles facing the implementation of the envisioned 5G cellular technology, specifically, the backhauling and signaling challenges; and 2) enables, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the support of efficient ground-breaking mobile data and signaling offload techniques, which significantly enhance the performance of both the HetNet-based RAN and LTE-A\u27s core network (Evolved Packet Core (EPC) per 3GPP standard), ensure that core network equipment is used more productively, and moderate the evolving 5G\u27s signaling growth and optimize its impact. To address the backhauling challenge, we propose a cost-effective fiber-based small cell backhaul infrastructure, which leverages existing fibered and powered facilities associated with a PON-based fiber-to-the-Node/Home (FTTN/FTTH)) residential access network. Due to the sharing of existing valuable fiber assets, the proposed PON-based backhaul architecture, in which the small cells are collocated with existing FTTN remote terminals (optical network units (ONUs)), is much more economical than conventional point-to-point (PTP) fiber backhaul designs. A fully distributed ring-based EPON architecture is utilized here as the fiber-based HetNet backhaul. The techno-economics merits of utilizing the proposed PON-based FTTx access HetNet RAN architecture versus that of traditional 4G LTE-A\u27s RAN will be thoroughly examined and quantified. Specifically, we quantify the techno-economics merits of the proposed PON-based HetNet backhaul by comparing its performance versus that of a conventional fiber-based PTP backhaul architecture as a benchmark. It is shown that the purposely selected ring-based PON architecture along with the supporting distributed control plane enable the proposed PON-based FTTx RAN architecture to support several key salient networking features that collectively significantly enhance the overall performance of both the HetNet-based RAN and 4G LTE-A\u27s core (EPC) compared to that of the typical fiber-based PTP backhaul architecture in terms of handoff capability, signaling overhead, overall network throughput and latency, and QoS support. It will also been shown that the proposed HetNet-based RAN architecture is not only capable of providing the typical macro-cell offloading gain (RAN gain) but also can provide ground-breaking EPC offloading gain. The simulation results indicate that the overall capacity of the proposed HetNet scales with the number of deployed small cells, thanks to LTE-A\u27s advanced interference management techniques. For example, if there are 10 deployed outdoor small cells for every macrocell in the network, then the overall capacity will be approximately 10-11x capacity gain over a macro-only network. To reach the 1000x capacity goal, numerous small cells including 3G, 4G, and WiFi (femtos, picos, metros, relays, remote radio heads, distributed antenna systems) need to be deployed indoors and outdoors, at all possible venues (residences and enterprises)

Design and Optimization of Fiber-Optic Small-Cell Backhaul Based on an Existing Fiber-to-the-Node Residential Access Network

Abstract: As the number of wireless users and per-user bandwidth demands continue to increase, both the vendor and carrier communities agree that wireless networks must evolve toward more dense deployments. So-called “heterogeneous networks ” are a commonly proposed evolution, whereby existing macro-cellular networks are supplemented with an underlay of small cells. The placement of new small-cell sites is typically determined based on various location-dependent factors such as radio propagation calculations, user densities, and measurements of congestion and demand. The backhaul network, which can account for a significant portion of the total cost of the deployment, is then designed in reaction to the placement of small cells. In contrast, we describe a design method which first considers the locations of existing fibered and powered facilities that might be leveraged to provide inexpensive backhaul. Naturally, such a method is only feasible if the carrier has a legacy local fiber network. This paper describes an efficient fiber backhaul strategy for a small-cell network, which leverages facilities associated with an existing fiber-to-the node (FTTN) residential access network. Once potential small-cell sites are determined from among all FTTN remote terminals (RTs), optimization techniques are used to choose the most efficient subset of sites for maximum coverage, and to design the fiber backhaul architecture. 1

Performance Analysis of Coexistence Schemes for LTE in Unlicensed Bands

LTE in the unlicensed spectrum, is becoming a popular area of research. Since LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) provides subscribers with higher-quality mobile voice, and video experience in high-traffic or low-signal locations, a fair coexistence mechanism with other networks, like Wi-Fi is essential. In this thesis, we propose two coexistence mechanisms that could be employed to ensure a fair channel access. First, we consider coexistence mechanism fundamentals, and then downlink system performance of two coexistence mechanisms are analyzed for multi-operator LTE-Unlicensed (LTE-U) deployments with different simulation scenarios, using NS-3. First we introduce the most trustworthy coexistence mechanism, and then a high-performance coexistence scenario is provided. We conclude that Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) can coexist with Wi-Fi without impacting Wi-Fi more than an equivalent Wi-Fi network. In the second part, uplink performance evaluation of LTE in licensed spectrum is also demonstrated