Enabling Optical Wired and Wireless Technologies for 5G and Beyond Networks

The emerging fifth-generation mobile communications are envisaged to support massive number of deployment scenarios based on the respective use case requirements. The requirements can be efficiently attended with ultradense small-cell cloud radio access network (C-RAN) approach. However, the C-RAN architecture imposes stringent requirements on the transport networks. This book chapter presents high-capacity and low-latency optical wired and wireless networking solutions that are capable of attending to the network demands. Meanwhile, with optical communication evolutions, there has been advent of enhanced photonic integrated circuits (PICs). The PICs are capable of offering advantages such as low-power consumption, high-mechanical stability, low footprint, small dimension, enhanced functionalities, and ease of complex system architectures. Consequently, we exploit the PICs capabilities in designing and developing the physical layer architecture of the second standard of the next-generation passive optical network (NG-PON2) system. Apart from being capable of alleviating the associated losses of the transceiver, the proposed architectures aid in increasing the system power budget. Moreover, its implementation can significantly help in reducing the optical-electrical-optical conversions issue and the required number of optical connections, which are part of the main problems being faced in the miniaturization of network elements. Additionally, we present simulation results for the model validation

TeamUp5G: a multidisciplinary approach to training and research on new RAN techniques for 5G ultra-dense mobile networks

Proceeding of: 12th IEEE/IET International Symposium on Communication Systems, Networks and Digital Signal Processing, (CSNDSP), 20-22, July 2020, (online).This paper presents a summary of the main research directions being followed in TeamUp5G European Training Network, teaming up a new generation of researchers and entrepreneurs ready to address complex engineering problems and innovation to work both at university and industry in the 5G field. This project is focused on new radio access network (RAN) techniques for 5G, considering ultradense mobile networks as a key ingredient of the actual mobile networks and their evolution. Research covers a wide spread of topics from physical layer and medium access control to applications, looking at spectrum sharing and energy efficiency as important features.This work has received funding from the European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie ETN TeamUp5G, grant agreement No. 813391