Ericsson has announced the successful testing of eXHAUL Project, a novel network concept which provides agnostic transport for Radio (Fronthaul & Backhaul) and Fixed Enterprise Access, supporting the current CPRI, eCPRI, Ethernet and future 5G fronthaul interfaces. The project is a collaborative activity between Telefonica and Ericsson aiming at the identification of concrete use cases, requirements and features, prospecting suitability to Telefonica reference scenarios. The project is carried out by Ericsson Research in tight cooperation with the Ericsson Network product management and system management. Tests took place at 5TONIC, the 5G research and innovation open lab founded by Telefonica and IMDEA Networks, and where Ericsson is an outstanding member.
The purpose of this activity is to investigate transport architectures, based on the eXHAUL concept developed in Ericsson, mapped onto the Telefonica radio access network and compatible with current LTE deployment scenarios, as well as allowing a seamless migration towards 5G networks. The reference scenario envisions a common infrastructure for backhaul and fronthaul that, starting from current radio access network and current LTE deployment scenarios, enables a seamless evolution towards 5G networks, considering relevant use cases agreed with Telefonica. The solution supports any client type for the different 5G protocol splits, satisfying tight requirements of latency, jitter and synchronization.
The tests performed at a 5TONIC event, which took place on November 16th, correspond to the second phase of the eXHAUL Project, which was initiated from the participation in the EU H2020 5G-Crosshaul (http://5g-crosshaul.eu/) project. The aim was to prospect a convergent infrastructure solution for 3G, 4G, 5G and business customers, concluding with the development of a PoC oriented to 5G Mobile-business convergent services. In the Event, an overview of the solution was presented, providing insights into the research that led to the eXHAUL concept, including topics like photonic technologies, networking aspects, control and the migration path from legacy to 5G. The event concluded showing the demo of the eXHAUL solution.
This joint research activity will continue in the coming months, focusing on topics such as the simplification of the configuration of the nodes in the last network segment, in order to reduce operational costs and facilitate interworking with the aggregation network. The solution developed will also address the reduced latency and deterministic delays required for 5G Services, as well as the SLA for service definition, the OAM aspects, and different bit rates for connectivity, assuring a smooth evolution towards 5G.

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

In the context of #Berlin5GWeek, 5G-Crosshaul partners CTTC, NEC and CND presented the demo “Resource Management in a Hierarchically Controlled Multi-domain Wireless/Optical Integrated Fronthaul and Backhaul Network” at the IEEE NFV-SDN’17 conference. This demo features several key concepts of 5G-Crosshaul project, namely,  an application interacts with a hierarchichal XCI deployment to orchestrate resources in an E2E transport network including different network domains and different transport technologies (mmWave, Wi-Fi, optical) to deploy an LTE service combining fronthaul and backhaul traffic profile.

5G-Crosshaul project has held its final workshop on 19 October at WWRF39 meeting in Barcelona. Key results from the project were shared by various speakers with particular emphasis on the final experimentations underway. Speakers were from InterDigital, CTTC, Nextworks, Telefonica, UC3M and I2CAT.

The workshop was co-organized by CTTC and InterDigital.

The 5G-Crosshaul, The integrated fronthaul/backhaul, part of the European H2020 5G Public-Private Partnership (5G PPP) Infrastructure, held a Plenary Meeting in Madrid on the 18th and 19th of September, 2017.

The 2 days meeting in Universidad Carlos III de Madrid has more than 50 experts from the 20 consortium members (leading telecom industry vendors, operators, IT companies, small and medium-sized enterprises and academic institutions) attending to share their visions and opinions in order to advance in the project objectives, milestones and deliverables.

European 5G Annual Journal 2017, prepared by the Euro-5G project, has just been released and is available for download here.