Cost-Efficient Optical Fronthaul Architectures for 5G and Future 6G Networks

Fifth-generation and Beyond (5GB) wireless networks have introduced new centralized architectures such as cloud radio access network (CRAN), which necessitate extremely high-capacity low latency Fronthaul (FH). CRAN has many advantageous features in terms of cost reduction, performance enhancement, ease of deployment, and centralization of network management. Nevertheless, designing and deploying a cost-efficient FH is still a stumbling block against mobile network operators (MNOs) that aim to deploy 5GB in a cost-effective manner. Many technologies have been proposed as a candidate for 5GB FH. Optical networking is the best long-term solution for overcoming the connection barrier between the radio access domain and the core network of 5GB. Therefore, we focus on optical technologies such as point-to-point optical fiber (P2P), passive optical networks (PON), and free-space optics (FSO). With that in mind, we propose in this paper an integer linear program (ILP) that results in a minimal total cost of ownership (TCO) considering both capital expenditure (Capex) and operational expenditure (Opex). For the scalability issue, we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem for large network instances. In order to evaluate the applicability of the proposed framework, we run the simulations to compare different FH architectures for two deployment areas (dense and sparse).