5G-Crosshaul partners Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Interdigital, Ericsson, CND, NEC and Nokia run the Demo “FRONTHAUL AND BACKHAUL TRAFFIC OVER 5G-CROSSHAUL DATA PLANE” in 5TONIC laboratory.
This integrated demo interconnects different transport technologies carrying backhaul traffic, fronthaul traffic and both in one network, which demonstrates the 5G-Crosshaul data plane technologies developed in the project. The traffic of backhaul and fronthaul for different functional splits are multiplexed and/or aggregated via XPFE and XCSE. In particular, two types of mmWave-based transport solutions are examined in this experiment, including backhaul/fronthaul (PDCP-RLC split) multiplexing with EdgeLink, and a mmWave interface incorporated with fast forwarding techniques handling fronthaul traffic with MAC-PHY splits. The traffic of two types of transport links are independently fed into the XCSE with physically separate ports. On the other hand, compressed and packetized fronthaul (CPFH) is applied to reduce bandwidth requirement of fronthaul traffic with a PHY-RF split. Also, backhaul traffic for a LTE eNodeB is considered. The multiplexed backhaul/fronthaul traffic is injected into a XCSE and integrated switch, which passes the traffic to BBU for lower-layer split (CPRI and CPFH), BBU for upper-layer split, and EPC in accordance to the functional split profile. An Integrated transport network that multiplex traffics with multiple functional splits is demonstrated, and performance metrics such as latency jitter and throughput are measured.
Key innovations:
- 5G Fronthaul (Upper and Lower Layer Splits)
- Multi-Layered Crosshaul Transport (Circuit and Packet)
- Fiber-like Low Latency mmWave Wireless Crosshaul Transport
