Fronthaul Resiliency in Latency Constrained C-RAN

This paper presents mobile network deploymentanalysis aimed at understanding the feasibility of resilient fronthaul in a centralized radio access network (C-RAN). A fiber and network infrastructure topology model is built using representative data sets to assess latency characteristics for cell sites with primary and secondary fronthaul links towards geographically diverse base-band aggregation points in the network. Findings have shown that as much as 96% of conventional dense urban macrocell sites could fulfil the fronthaul latency requirements necessary for a resilient fronthaul C-RAN architecture when base-band aggregation is deployed at the local exchange level.Furthermore, as much as 71% of sites could support resilient fronthaul fiber links when base-band is deployed deeper in the network topology at a regional exchange level.