Analysis of the cost-effective digital radio over fiber system in the NG-PON2 context

The current trends on traffic and mobile users´ growth is pushing the capacity of the current networks to the limit, which has led telecommunication operators to expand their investment in infrastructure. In this context, centralized RAN (C-RAN) comes with an innovative solution for the changes that will occur in the network. C-RAN shifts all the complex functionalities from the base stations (BS) to the central office (CO). A new segment called fronthaul connects the base band unit (BBU) with the remote antenna over a digital radio over fiber (DRoF) transmission based on the common public radio interface (CPRI). In this work we investigate, by means of simulation, the performance of DRoF in several contexts: single channel and in coexistence scenario. To meet this goal, we first investigate the key aspects of DRoF in an isolated transmission and next we proceed with a coexistence scenario based on the ITU-T G.989 standard (NG-PON2). The results show that the DRoF system is compatible with a NG-PON2 with respect to the wavelength plan and bandwidth requirements.