Utilization comparison of small-cell accommodation with PON-based mobile fronthaul

The network between the baseband units (BBUs) and the remote radio heads (RRHs) in a centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is called the mobile fronthaul (MFH). A passive optical network (PON) is expected to reduce the deployment cost of MFH by sharing the optical fibers. Using system-level simulation results as a basis, we report that MFH downlink utilization can be improved with PON, regardless of the functional splitting point between BBUs and RRHs. We then clarify the application range of PON-based architectures, which represents the number of small cells that a PON system can accommodate with a certain amount of user equipment and certain data rates.