5G Fronthaul Design Based on Software-defined and Virtualized Radio Access Network

5G mobile communication has become a focused area in recent years. In order to provide higher quality of services, 5G network needs a novel architecture. C-Radio Access Network (C- RAN) is an RAN architecture viewed as the evolution from LTE to 5G network, although it still has many problems to solve. Next Generation Fronthaul Interface (NGFI), as a new interface of the fronthaul based on Ethernet, will make the fronthaul more efficient and flexible. As the Operator-RAN (O-RAN) and extensible-RAN (xRAN) state, Software-defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) should be introduced to RAN to make it more flexible and efficient. Meanwhile, it also brings new issues such as latency and jitter of the fronthaul. This paper has proposed an approach to reducing the latency and jitter. Besides, we have also built an experimental 5G system to validate that NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) platform can increase the scalability of the system at cost of a slight decrease of performance.