Transport Network Design for FrontHaul

The evolution of LTE and advent of 5G networks increases further the bandwidth requirements for RAN. In parallel, the deployment of Centralized RAN architecture raises new challenges on the FrontHaul network. The inflexibility of the legacy CPRI is the primary challenge to Virtualized RAN deployments, and there is currently a strong trend towards the use of packetized transport methods, together with flexible split RAN based architectures. Functional splits within the real-time functions of the RAN have very stringent requirements on latency and jitter. This paper analyzes the jitter produced in the switching nodes of the FrontHaul network, and proposes dimensioning rules.