Adaptive Signal Compression in Intermediate Frequency Band for DRoF Mobile Fronthaul

An adaptive compression method in intermediate frequency band digitized radio over fiber is proposed for mobile fronthaul, aiming at reducing the transmission rates. The proposed method uses radio channel state information parameters to control fronthaul compression. The simulation results demonstrate the ability of the proposed method on reducing the quantization error, allowing the use of lower (4-bits) quantizer resolution for 64-QAM modulated signals, providing 2:1 compression rate with near zero EVM. In addition, our proposed method surpasses μ-law and A-law compression techniques and performs in shorter times than 5G latency target (1 ms). Finally, the performance of uncompressed and compressed signal is assessed experimentally in 20 km of fiber transmission.