A20 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018
Low-Latency High-Efficiency Mobile
Fronthaul With TDM-PON (Mobile-PON)
Siyu Zhou, Xiang Liu, Frank Effenberger, and Jonathan Chao
Abstract—To meet the capacity requirements of the ex-
ponential increase in mobile traffic and to continue to drive
down the per-bit cost for mobile service providers, the
cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has become a crucial
step toward 5G. However, the current C-RAN architecture
has some major drawbacks in terms of scalability, cost, and
efficiency. In this paper, we propose and numerically dem-
onstrate a novel mobile fronthaul architecture based on
functional split and time-division multiplexed (TDM) pas-
sive optical networks (PONs) with a unified mobile and
PON scheduler known as Mobile-PON. The optimal func-
tional split distributes lower physical layer hardware to-
ward remote radio sites. The new interface that divides
the remote radio processing, and centralized baseband
processing requires less bandwidth, also opens the pos-
sibility of sharing and multiplexing the bandwidth with
multiple remote sites. Our combined mobile and PON
scheduler is mainly based on the more complex wireless
scheduling that translates its results into the TDM-PON
system through LTE resource block mapping, eliminating
additional scheduling delay at the PON. Without the addi-
tional scheduling delay, the cost-effective TDM-PON
becomes applicable for mobile fronthaul, while the optimal
fronthaul interface increases bandwidth efficiency by ∼10×
over CPRI.
Index Terms—CPRI; C-RAN; DBA; Fronthaul; Functional
split; Mobile scheduling; TDM-PON.
I. INTRODUCTION
T he cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has become a
crucial mobile access architecture, enabling new wire-
less technologies such as coordinated multi-point (CoMP)
advanced intercell interference coordination (ICIC), mas-
sive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO), etc. [1–3].
A typical C-RAN divides the entire function of a traditional
base station (BS) into two parts: remote radio units (RRUs)
and baseband units (BBUs). RRUs are distributed across
cell sites handling all wireless signal transmission, and pass
quantized samples of analog wireless signals via the
Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) to the BBUs for fur-
ther processing. The hardware function of RRUs therefore
becomes very simple, while BBUs take care of the rest of
the physical layer processing and higher layer functions.
Manuscript received July 3, 2017; revised September 5, 2017; accepted
September 12, 2017; published October 20, 2017 (Doc. ID 301360).
S. Zhou (e-mail: sz1596@nyu.edu) and J. Chao are with New York
University, Tandon School of Engineering, Brooklyn, New York 11201, USA.
X. Liu and F. Effenberger are with Huawei Technologies, Bridgewater,
New Jersey 08807, USA.
https://doi.org/10.1364/JOCN.10.000A20
1943-0620/18/010A20-07 Journal © 2018 Optical Society of America
Zhou et al.
The physical location of BBUs can be in a central office
(CO) that stretches tens of kilometers from the RRUs, but
is connected through a reliable optical network, namely,
the fronthaul. Although pooling BBUs in a centralized
location lowers maintenance cost and provides the benefit
of shared resource pooling, deploying a fronthaul network
is very costly because sending quantized samples of analog
wireless signals from a RRU to a BBU requires not only
high bandwidth but also very low latency.
Current CPRI application on mobile fronthaul is band-
width inefficient, e.g., often requiring 30 bits to transmit a
sample [4]. The transmission latency should also not ex-
ceed 250 μs as recommended by the Next Generation
Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMA) [5]. Because of such
high requirements, only expensive solutions such as WDM-
PON can fully support CPRI-based C-RAN fronthaul.
To increase the bandwidth efficiency of mobile fronthaul
and to better support future generations of mobile systems
such as 5G, the Next-Generation Fronthaul Interface
(NGFI) [6] has been introduced. In NGFI, various func-
tional splits are being defined to provide different trade-
offs among RRU complexity, system performance, and
fronthaul bandwidth efficiency. Normally higher level split
interfaces, which distribute more functionality toward
RRUs, would increase bandwidth efficiency. However, that
would also kill the advantages of centralized baseband ra-
dio processing. A carefully engineered fronthaul interface
is required to maximize the benefit of centralization while
constraining the fronthaul networking requirement.
In addition to fronthaul functional split, time-division
multiplexed (TDM) passive optical networks (PONs) have
been proposed to reduce the implementation cost of CPRI-
based mobile fronthaul via the sharing of the same optical
distribution network (ODN) by multiple RRU sites [7,8].
The main challenge here is to find a solution to overcome
the high medium access latency of TDM-PON.
In this paper, we propose a high-bandwidth-efficiency
and low-processing-latency mobile fronthaul architecture
based on physical layer functional split and TDM-PON
with a unified mobile scheduler, which we refer to as
Mobile-PON. The use of a unified mobile scheduler elimi-
nates the need for conventional PON scheduling. Through
simulations, we show that fronthaul bandwidth efficiency
can be increased 10-fold with no additional processing
latency for PON scheduling. We focus our discussion in this
paper on uplink, since most of the challenging issues are
only for uplink but do not exist for downlink.
Zhou et al.
The rest of this paper is divided into four sections. In
Section II we present some existing efforts in redefining func-
tional split interfaces to reduce fronthaul bandwidth and our
own position in this discussion. Section III introduces the
concept of a cost-effective Mobile-PON based on an optimal
functional split scheme and discusses the specific operation
details of the unified scheduling in Mobile-PON, including
the static and dynamic mapping schemes. Section IV shows
a proof-of-concept simulation verification of the design.
Finally, Section V concludes the paper.
II. NEW FUNCTIONAL SPLIT INTERFACES
The general fronthaul functional modules for the uplink
direction are shown in Fig. 1. The eNode user plane protocol
stack can be divided into the following layers: packet data
convergence protocol (PDCP), radio link control (RLC),
medium access control (MAC), and physical (PHY) layer.
The PHY layer is further divided since it is responsible
for most of the radio processing. The conventional CPRI
is the most aggressive functional split interface, as shown
in Fig. 1(a), where almost all PHY layer and higher layer
functions are centralized, and RRU signal processing is kept
at bare minimum. It needs only to sample and quantize
time-domain wireless signal waveforms, and digitized radio
waveforms are communicated through the mobile fronthaul.
This scheme provides the maximum benefits of centraliza-
tion, shared resource pooling, and best architectural support
for CoMP. Since all PHY radio processing is at the central-
ized BBU, RRUs can be taken as extended antennas that can
jointly receive and transmit to the same user from different
cell sites, bringing cell edge and MIMO performance to a
new level. However, to support such a system, the mobile
fronthaul must bear a huge constant transmission rate that
is independent of the actual wireless data volume. Because
of the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogo-
nal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA), 15 bits are
required to quantize each sample, and the fronthaul data
transmission can be as much as 30 times more than the
actual data throughput on the wireless interface [9].
Furthermore, a RRU also needs to always upload to a
Fig. 1. (a) Schematic of the generalized CPRI-based LTE PHY
layer processing steps for the uplink direction, and (b) schematic
of the optimal functional split interface of Mobile-PON.
VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. A21
BBU at the peak rate as if the wireless interface is always
under full load, even when the antennas are receiving noth-
ing, because the RRU functionality is so simple that it can-
not distinguish whether the received signal is noise or data.
To relax the fronthaul bandwidth requirement, one reason-
able split interface is between MAC and PHY (MAC-PHY
split). Rather than sending IQ samples, LTE MAC frame data
would be communicated through the mobile fronthaul, and,
therefore, a MAC-PHY split significantly reduces the optical
bandwidth requirement [10]. However, a MAC-PHY split also
eliminates key CoMP functions such as joint reception and
multi-cell centralized MIMO processing, because all PHY
functions are distributed at the RRU. The LTE MAC frames
are decoded wireless data. Other advanced wireless concepts,
such as user centric networking (UCN), which erases the tra-
ditional cell boundary, also depends on centralized PHY radio
processing. Therefore, a simple MAC-PHY split is unsatisfac-
tory given such requirements.
Another promising split, as shown in Fig. 1(b), is within
the PHY layer between the wireless resource demapping
and the modulation decoding, which offers two major ben-
efits: (1) reduced quantization resolution requirement and
(2) increased transmission efficiency by transmitting only
the populated wireless resource blocks (RBs). If the uplink
is based on the actual wireless RB utilization, we can take
advantage of the tidal effect [1] with additional multiplex-
ing gain by sharing the bandwidth when multiple RRUs
experience different load at different times. Compared to
conventional CPRI, which samples at the time domain with
high PAPR, a PHY split allows us to sample at the fre-
quency domain with seven to eight fewer quantization bits
[9]. More importantly, a PHY layer functional split at RB
demapping may still preserve the possibility of CoMP.
Wireless channel decoding is the last PHY layer function
in an uplink, and it uses the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) data
output from the wireless demodulation function to retrieve
the received bit data, so, as long as the final decoding func-
tion is centralized, joint reception and multi-cell MIMO
could still be possible [10]. Since most PHY layer hardware
is difficult to share, distributing some PHY hardware func-
tions while keeping higher layer functions centralized does
not decrease the benefit of hardware resource pooling.
In short, redefining the split interface at RB demapping
still preserves the major benefits of C-RAN, while it signifi-
cantly alleviates fronthaul bandwidth requirements. With
the functional split interface shown in Fig. 1(b) as a foun-
dation, we developed the Mobile-PON, a low-latency mobile
fronthaul based on-cost effective TDM-PON.
III. MOBILE-PON
Figure 2 shows how the fronthaul interface is applied in
a TDM-PON system to support multiple remote sites for
C-RAN. Each RRU is attached to an optical network unit
(ONU), and the BBU is attached to the optical line terminal
(OLT). For downlink scheduling, latency is low, but for up-
link transmission, the scheduling latency could be of the
order of 1 ms [11] due to the dynamic bandwidth allocation
(DBA) where each ONU must send a request to an OLT
A22 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018
Fig. 2. Schematic of the use of Mobile-PON for C-RAN.
first, then the OLT grants each ONU an uplink channel
such that the data signal from each ONU can arrive at
the OLT at different times without any interference.
In frequency division duplex (FDD) LTE, the standards
allow only 4 ms for the hybrid automatic repeat request
(HARQ) process [12]. Within this 4 ms time frame, we need
about 1 ms for uplink acquisition and another 1 ms for down-
link processing. When the combined packetization, RRU,
and BBU processing time is around 1.75 ms [13], the delay
budget left for fronthaul is no more than 250 μs [5]. However,
as analyzed in Ref. [11] this DBA cycle of conventional TDM-
PON systems is intolerable for LTE and future wireless sys-
tems. For future 5G, which aims to achieve 1 ms delay end to
end [14], the timing requirement will become only more con-
strained. Therefore, to complement the NGFI discussed
above, it is necessary to develop a low-latency, scalable,
and cost-effective Mobile-PON architecture that is system-
atically designed for mobile fronthaul.
A. Static Mapping
A TDM-PON serving mobile fronthaul can eliminate its
DBA process with the following steps. We can first divide
the uplink into equal time slots or PON transport blocks
(TBs). The amount of data that can be carried in each
PON TB must be greater than or equal to the sampled data
size of a LTE physical RB. Then we eliminate the uplink
DBA process by mapping the received wireless RB data
directly to a PON TB according to a predefined mapping
rule, as shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Illustration of the static mapping between the LTE RBs
and the PON TBs.
Zhou et al.
Since the location of RBs in an OFDMA frame is the LTE
scheduling result, a one-to-one LTE RB to PON TB mapping
can ensure that no uplink optical signal interference will oc-
cur. In effect, ONUs make scheduling decisions based on dis-
tributed mapping rules to avoid additional PON DBA
scheduling processing. Whenever the remote site receives
a batch of RBs, it will load the RBs to Mobile-PON TBs ac-
cording to the mapping rules. To efficiently utilize all PON
bandwidth, the capacity of a PON TB should be the same as
or an integer multiple of a sampled RB data size. Figure 2 is
a scenario of three RRUs sharing a single carrier. The map-
ping rule can be static, as further illustrated in Fig. 3. As
long as no user equipment (UE) interfere with each other
by using the same RB on the wireless interface, the PON
TBs from each remote site are guaranteed to be free of col-
lision, because we map each wireless RB to only one TB. To
explain the scheme more clearly, a hypothetical single car-
rier scenario is given in Fig. 4. We assume for each frame
there are 4 × 4 RBs. RRU1 uploads data only to the BBU
at the TB timeslots that correspond to wireless RBs 1–5
and 8 since RRU1 uses only those RBs. During the rest of
the TB timeslots, RRU1 must not upload any data, so that
the uploading optical transmission from RRU2 and RRU3
does not see interference from RRU1.
Operation of the Mobile-PON design depends on a PHY
functional split. In Ref. [11] a novel DBA-scheme-based
BBU scheduling was investigated. Based on BBU uplink
scheduling, we should be able to anticipate the volume
of data received by each RRU before the wireless data
reaches the RRU. However, as discussed earlier, the split
interface for CPRI samples on the time domain and leaves
the RRU with little PHY function. Even if the RRU could
anticipate the actual wireless data throughput, on fronthaul
the CPRI data volume would remain constant. In the end a
simple fixed bandwidth allocation could take care of the
latency issue in DBA [7], but there would be no multiplexing
gain, and the bandwidth requirement would remain high.
A combination of a PHY functional split and Mobile-PON
mapping scheme provides the advantage of efficient band-
width usage without additional scheduling latency.
The result of the Mobile-PON mapping scheme made the
essentially TDM-based PON fronthaul transparent to the
C-RAN system with no additional MAC delay. However,
Fig. 4. Static mapping based on wireless MAC scheduling.
Zhou et al.
the relative transparency is only on the data plane. Basic
PON system setup is still required for mobile-PON. The op-
tical propagation delay from different remote sites to the
centralized side may be different, so each remote unit must
be synchronized such that all TBs from different sites reach
the central OLT interface at the proper time [15].
Fortunately, current TDM-PON technology can obtain
precise synchronization timing of only 125 ns.
B. Dynamic Mapping
Although current optical technology can support Mobile-
PON, the static mapping scheme has limitations and is in-
sufficient to handle complex situations. The RB to TB map-
ping does not have to be fixed at all times. For example, the
total number of TBs must be greater than or equal to the
total number of possible RBs for static mapping to work. It
also requires that no RRU uses the same uplink RB within
the frequency reuse area. Normal wireless operation meets
this requirement but not advanced CoMP features, such as
joint reception and inter-cell MIMO, where at the cell edge
a UE could be communicating with two RRUs using the
same RB. Also, TBs cannot be shared across RBs from dif-
ferent carriers. To overcome such limitations, we developed
a more sophisticated dynamic mapping scheme.
Under dynamic mapping, the RB mapping rule can be
changed dynamically. If two RRUs are using the same RB
on the same carrier (e.g., in the case of CoMP) or when a
BBU makes a new wireless scheduling decision, the BBU re-
calculates mapping rules dynamically such that no two
ONUs use the same TB, as shown in Fig. 5. For instance,
RB16 does not have to map to T16 as in static mapping.
At time frame 1 it could map to T2, while it could also
map to other TBs at different time frames. However, dynamic
mapping needs to make sure that none of the remote sites
uses the same TB simultaneously. The process will not incur
extra time delay because a new wireless scheduling decision
needs to be updated with UEs anyway. Thus, updating ONUs
based on the new mapping information involves no additional
timing overhead. When the total load is small, dynamic map-
ping can also minimize latency by assigning those occupied
RBs to the earlier TBs, and assigning empty RBs to later TBs.
Dynamic RB to TB mapping also provides higher flexibil-
ity for bandwidth multiplexing. Normally the hardware in-
frastructure is initially provisioned such that it can
Fig. 5. Dynamic mapping based on wireless MAC scheduling.
VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. A23
support all cells operating at full load. However, the actual
cellular load varies significantly with respect to the location
and time, and peak load happens at rare times of a day.
Therefore, the multiplexing gain would be significant if
residual cellular bandwidth can be shared with non-
fronthaul data transfers, such as fiber-to-home or edge cloud
communications. Dynamic mapping opens the possibility of
sharing those unmapped TBs for other data transfer usage.
A notable property of Mobile-PON is that RB to TB map-
ping requires extremely short laser bursts, as anticipated in
Ref. [16] for future PON technologies. OFDMA is a two-
dimensional multiplexing scheme for both time and fre-
quency. If all RBs are to be mapped to a one-dimensional
time-multiplexed TB within the same time frame, the dura-
tion of a single TB should be much shorter than that of a RB,
depending on the spectral frequency. For example, at 20 MHz
there are 100 RBs stacked in the 0.5 ms duration of a RB.
Therefore, for a single carrier the short burst should be no
more than 5 μs. The authors of Ref. [17] have already exper-
imentally demonstrated that the 10G PON can achieve
microsecond level packet bursts with only 25.6 ns guard time.
However, given the speed of fiber, a mere 5 μs TB may still
have the capacity of several RBs. For example, in 10G PON, a
5 μs slot can transmit about 50 kb of data, which is 5–10
times the capacity of a RB. To efficiently use the entire optical
bandwidth, we should pack multiple RBs from the same
RRU to one TB. There are two requirements when packing
multiple RBs to one TB. First, the RBs must all belong to the
same RRU; otherwise, signals from different remote sites
would interfere with each other if packed to the same TB.
Second, the RBs must all be at the same time slot so that
there would be no additional waiting delay in collecting all
RBs for the TB pack. The flexible multiplexing and RB pack-
ing schemes are only possible in dynamic mapping mode, but
had not been discussed in the previous work [18].
In a nutshell, dynamic mapping is much more flexible
than static mapping. A good mapping scheme can optimize
PHY layer latency and bandwidth. Here we provide an
elementary mapping that minimizes PHY layer delay
and bandwidth waste. Given that TBk is the kth PON
TB for the timing interval of subframe 1, TBk ∈ Sub1 .
RRUn is the nth RRU served under the BBU. RBn;c;i repre-
sents the ith RB of carrier c served by RRUn. Let Cn be the
total number of carriers on RRUn . At the peak wireless
data rate, the throughput on mobile-PON would be
C1 X
X bw C2 X
X bw Cn X
X bw
Peak Rate  D D    D; (1)
where D is the data size of one RB sampled into a TB. In
TDM-PON, the time duplex mode strictly dictates that TBk
will arrive earlier than Tbj if k < j. To reduce fronthaul
PHY latency, we prefer to map all RBs to the earliest
PON TBs. Therefore, in a minimal latency dynamic map-
ping, if TBk is empty and k < j, then TBj is also empty. No
two RRUs can use the same PON TB, or they would inter-
fere each other.
d
If RBn;c;i and RB n;c;i are from different RRUs (n ≠ n̂), but
c  ĉ, i  î and physically RRUn is adjacent to RRUn̂ , then
we are dealing with the case of joint reception where two or
A24 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018 Zhou et al.

multiple RRUs jointly receive the same signal. On the

wireless side, this is allowed for CoMP to gain better cell
edge performance. However, two remote sites cannot share
the same TDM-PON TB. For a BBU to accurately decode
the jointly received wireless data, it requires both RBn;c;i
d
and RB n;c;i . Let JRj be the jointly received RB bundles from
d
UEj , so JRj  RBn;c;i ; RB n;c;i . RBs in the same JR bundle
should be mapped to adjacent TBs so that the BBU does not
need to hold one block and wait for the rest to arrive:

c
JRj  Rbn;c;i ; Rb n;c;i ; (2)

Rbn;c;i → Tbk ; c
Rbn;c;i → Tbk1 : (3)

Starting with jointly received RBs, first we can iterate

through all JR bundles and pack them into adjacent
TBs. For the normal non-jointly received RBs we iterate
through all RRU sites, all carriers at each site, and all
of the respective RBs.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
To evaluate the feasibility and performance of the pro-
posed Mobile-PON we conducted several proof-of-concept
simulations. Some of the results have also been reported
in Ref. [18]. This paper serves as a more detailed extension.
The wireless simulation parameters, as shown in Table I,
are based on some standard LTE configurations. We as-
sumed random RB scheduling with FDD-LTE frequency re-
use factor larger than 1. The time durations needed for the
optical signal to propagate through the fiber link from dif-
ferent remote sites to the centralized receiver are different.
During the initial synchronization phase, the timings of the
uplink signal blocks from the remote devices must thus be
tuned to compensate for the propagation delay differences,
such that these uplink TBs from the remote sites are
synchronized when they reach the centralized receiver.
Figure 6 is a sample capture of the uplink load on a LTE
frame. Each colored block represents a RB. Evidently, the
centralized mobile scheduler can guarantee contention-
free transmission on a physical uplink shared channel
(PUSCH) and a physical uplink control channel (PUCCH).
For a physical random access channel (PRACH), the access
is random with unknown user information. Mobile-PON
would assume RBs for PRACH are always occupied and
Fig. 6. Coordinated uplink random RB scheduling without
contention.
map them to TBs. In Fig. 7, each column represents a TB.
Since we merge two MAC scheduling processes into one,
the conventional PON scheduling latency is eliminated.
The serialization delay to send all RBs into Mobile-PON is
inversely proportional to the fronthaul bandwidth.
Figure 7 demonstrates an exemplary Mobile-PON TB
scheduled by static mapping (a) and dynamic mapping
(b) with the minimum required optical bandwidth. In static
mapping, the occupied TBs are as random as the wireless
RBs, but for dynamic mapping the mapping rules can be
optimized and updated such that those empty RBs are
mapped to the earliest possible TBs in every 0.5 ms time
slot. Under small load, the average delay for dynamic map-
ping can be only a few microseconds with 10G PON, but
under the full load condition, the Mobile-PON delay in
static and dynamic mapping become similar, as shown in
Fig. 8. Our latency calculation does not include the optical

TABLE I
LTE SIMULATION PARAMETERS FOR EVALUATING MOBILE-PON
Uplink bandwidth 10 MHz
Bandwidth/channel (RB) 180 kHz
Subcarriers/channel (RB) 12 subcarriers
Resource element 7 per subcarrier
Frame duration 10 ms
Sub-frame cycle 1 ms (2RBs/frame)
RB per time slot 50 RB/0.5 ms
RB per frame 50 × 20  1000
Fig. 7. Mobile-PON TBs scheduled by (a) static mapping and
Duplex FDD
(b) dynamic mapping.
Zhou et al.
Fig. 8. Average serialization delay per RB versus average load
(assuming 10G PON).
propagation delay, which could add another 1–50 μs,
depending on the fiber’s physical length.
This is because all TBs should be occupied in the
fully loaded case. Even under the worst-case scenario,
the average serialization delay is still below 15 μs, and
the maximum delay will not exceed 30 μs with 10G PON.
The simulation configuration for LTE is the same as in
Table I. The fronthaul and PON configuration is shown
in Table II. For a single carrier scenario with optimal
PHY layer split, the minimum bandwidth requirement is
less than 600 mbps. When a 10G PON is applied to the
fronthaul, it can either support more carriers, more remote
radio sites, or use the spare bandwidth for other purposes.
In Fig. 6 the simulation scenario has only three RRUs, so
the multiplexing gain is three because, instead of having
one optical receiver and a dedicated optical link for every
remote site, TDM allows RRUs to share the same link.
Combined with the reduced traffic volume due to the rede-
fined fronthaul interface, the overall bandwidth efficiency
is increased significantly. Bandwidth efficiency can be fur-
ther improved if more RRUs are added to the same front-
haul link. However, serialization delay would also increase
unless the starting instant of a sub-frame is slightly shifted
at different RRUs that employ frequency reuse.
TABLE II
FRONTHAUL SIMULATION PARAMETERS FOR EVALUATING
MOBILE-PON
Samples per frame (10 ms) 84,000 (84/RB)
Quantization bit 8 × 2  16
Number of RRUs 3 RRUs
Antennas per RRU 4 overhead on fronthaul. Dynamic mapping provides more
Fronthaul bits per RB 5376 bits
Bits per guard block 400 bits
TB capacity 53,920 bits
PON bandwidth 10 Gbps (543 Mbps min)
VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018/J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW. A25
Fig. 9. Average latency per RB with respect to the number of
remote units.
Assuming an 8 bit quantization resolution, 64QAM, and
4-by-4 MIMO, each RB would require at least 5376 bits on
fronthaul. If we separate uplink and downlink with a
10 Gbps link on each direction, a 10G PON can support
at most 18 RRUs if all have one independent carrier under
full load with 10 MHz uplink bandwidth, nine RRUs if
20 MHz. However, adding more remote units would inevi-
tably increase average data latency, as shown in Fig. 9,
given the same experimental parameters as in Tables I
and II. Although supporting more RRUs would increase
the average delay exponentially, the additional delay intro-
duced by Mobile-PON under worst case is still bounded by
one RB time duration (0.5 ms). A 60–70 μs latency is still
acceptable. However, due to bandwidth limitations, having
more than 18 RRUs would cause infinite delay when all
RRUs are operating at full load.
V. CONCLUSION
An optical access network and a wireless system used to
be two completely separated systems. Being modularized
allows engineers from both sides to focus on their respec-
tive system, but at the cost of duplicated overhead. Our
proposed Mobile-PON architecture follows a design phi-
losophy of merging a PON system into the wireless system
with a unified scheduler, rather than treating them as two
separate systems. The Mobile-PON fronthaul takes advan-
tage of the new PHY layer functional split between the
wireless resource demapping and the modulation decoding
to increase the fronthaul bandwidth efficiency by about 10×
over CPRI, while still supporting key centralized functions
of C-RAN. Static mapping translates each RB in a LTE
frame to a unique PON TB without additional scheduling
flexibility through the freedom of dynamically changing
RB to TB mapping association. The new mapping decision
is updated promptly at remote sites to flexibly support
various wireless technologies.
A26 J. OPT. COMMUN. NETW./VOL. 10, NO. 1/JANUARY 2018
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