Assessment of fixed mobile converged backhaul and fronthaul networks

To cope with the forecasted traffic increase in mobile networks small cell deployments are considered as a key enabler. Compared with Macro Sites (MS), Small Cells (SC) will be deployed on a larger scale and thus require a more cost effective transport connection than in today's CWDM backhaul networks. An important question for this transport network is “Is it preferable to have a common converged transport network in the access aggregation to cope with fixed mass market and potentially new small cell sites or is a separate network for the SC better?”. This paper investigates NG-PON2, and WDM-PON with different flavours as well as CWDM as a reference for different backhaul and fronthaul architectures. The results show the cost for the different transport options as a function of number of deployed small cells considering both FTTC and FTTH areas. From these results one can conclude that re-using an already deployed mass market solution is not always the most beneficial choice.