Performance analysis of optical front-hauling for 5G Waveforms

Summary form only given. Multicarrier modulation based schemes - Universally Filtered Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (UF-OFDM) and Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing (GFDM) have emerged as potential candidate waveforms for 5G mobile communication [1]. Fronthauling (the delievry of services between centralized baseband unit (C-BBU) and radio element at antenna site) of the 5G signals in the optical domain is an obvious choice, considering the ultra-dense deployment of small cell antenna sites that will be required to provide an aggregated data rate of 1000 times larger than 4G systems with low latency, high capacity and flexibility, coupled with energy efficient low cost centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture [2]. Analog intermediate frequency over fiber (AIFoF) fronthauling technique provides more flexibility and uses lower bandwidth optical components compared to radio/mmW frequency signal over fiber techniques [2]. In this work, we experimentally study the suitability of optical transmission of 5G waveforms, UF-OFDM and GFDM, for fronthauling applications using an AIFoF technique, and compare their performances with OFDM.