Abstract
Wired-wireless convergence technology such as radio-over-fiber (RoF) is regarded as a promising candidate to deliver broadband wireless data from/to edge cloud to/from antenna sites, a notable example being the fronthaul (FH) in centralized/cloud radio access network (C-RAN). In 5G and beyond, the latency, bandwidth and fidelity requirements on FH pose great challenges to the RoF schemes. In this article, we focus on analog-to-digital-compression RoF (ADX-RoF) scheme based on low-latency MIMO data compression, which has the potential to reduce FH data rate by ∼90% compared with traditional digital RoF (CPRI) while still maintaining signal fidelity for high-order radio modulation. To verify the practicality of ADX-RoF in the latency-sensitive FH scenario, real-time hardware demonstration with latency evaluation is indispensable. We propose and design a real-time ADX, which achieves low-latency and high-throughput together with high-fidelity. Enabled by the ADX prototyped on a single-chip field-programmable radio platform (i.e., Xilinx RFSoC), we experimentally demonstrate 16-channel MIMO radio reception, real-time ADX processing and RoF transport. With <500 ns one-way ADX latency, less than 1.5% average EVM is achieved for 1024QAM, 61.44 MHz NR-class signals at a compression ratio of 13.3%. Negligible fiber-induced performance penalty is observed after 40 km transport. The results highlight the attractiveness of ADX-RoF for future FH.
PDF Article
More Like This
Cited By
You do not have subscription access to this journal. Cited by links are available to subscribers only. You may subscribe either as an Optica member, or as an authorized user of your institution.
Contact your librarian or system administrator
or
Login to access Optica Member Subscription