Design of Radio over Fiber System with 16-QAM Modulation for 5G Fronthaul Network Implementation in Indonesia

In 5G Network, Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) plays a substantial role in escalating network performance efficiency. Nevertheless, this C-RAN concept’s main challenge lies in the need for a fronthaul network to handle high capacity and low delay. The Radio over Fiber (RoF) has been a solution to satisfy the high capacity and high-speed transmission required by the 5G fronthaul network. Keeping the attenuation effect low to achieve the minimum BER by using the optical amplifier is necessary. This paper investigates RoF by considering amplifier placement and different bitrate with 16-QAM modulation for Indonesia’s 5G Fronthaul Network Implementation. Optical amplifier placement scenarios are pre-amplifier and booster amplifier. The results show that the booster amplifier scheme can cover a maximum fronthaul transmission distance of 20 km. As a comparison, the pre-amplifier scheme can reach a transmission distance of up to 15 km. Moreover, increasing the bitrate from 1 Gbps to 2.5 Gbps causes the BER value to increase. This result shows that different optical amplifiers and the increase in bit rate will affect the obtained BER values and limit the transmission distance that the fronthaul network can achieve.