5G mm Wave Networks Leveraging Enhanced Fiber-Wireless Convergence for High-Density Environments: The 5G-PHOS Approach

Analog optical fronthaul for 5G network architectures is currently being promoted as a bandwidth- and energy-efficient technology that can sustain the data-rate, latency and energy requirements of the emerging 5G era. This paper presents 5G-PHOS project approach, which relies on a new optical fronthaul architecture that can effectively synergize optical transceiver, optical add/drop multiplexer and optical beamforming integrated photonics towards a DSP-assisted analog fronthaul, administered by means of a Medium Transparent Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation (MT-DBA) protocol for seamless and medium-transparent 5G small-cell networks.