Optical transport solutions for 5G fixed wireless access [Invited]

With the advent of 5G, fixed wireless access (FWA) has emerged as a promising candidate for rolling out fixed broadband services. By means of radio simulations, we define a 5G radio deployment scenario for FWA that can meet the service requirements of future fixed broadband access. Different transport requirements imposed by different radio access network (RAN) split options are considered and a broad range of optical transport technologies/systems to support the FWA scenario is analyzed. For higher-layer RAN split options, we find that conventional 10G passive optical networks (XG-PONs) and coarse wavelength-division multiplexing (CWDM) technologies are the most cost effective. CWDM provides improved support for low-latency services while XG-PON facilitates future migration to fiber to the home. For lower-layer RAN splits, point-to-point (PtP) fiber or PtP-WDM is required. In the considered scenario, CWDM and PtP technologies are found to be the most cost effective.