Impact of radio over fiber technology for integrated 5G front and back-haul applications

The future vision of integrating back and front-haul in 5G mobile networks requires the designing of high capacity network transport architecture, enabling flexible management service with high fidelity. This paper presents an approach of using Radio over Fiber technology for 5G back and front-haul applications. The proposed design was verified using co-design photonics method to investigate the performance and reliability for long-haul transmission. Our design shows better performance at high data rate, which can significantly increase the system capacity for 5G-radio access and core network functions, due to the use of low cost optoelectronic components for data transport. This approach will play a major role for future 5G integrated transport system designs, since it is the evolution of coexisting 4G network architecture.