A low cost PON-FSO based fronthaul solution for 5G CRAN architecture

The continuous growth in mobile network traffic driven by the extensive range of new user applications, for instance, interactive e-learning, social networking sites, remote medical service and machine-to-machine communication has pushed the mobile network operators to enhance their network capacity. The main solution to deal with this problem is to deploy thousands of low power small cell base stations through Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture. The C-RAN offers a green solution for the deployment of small cells with advanced wireless features such as coordinated multipoint, joint scheduling, and multi-radio access technology. However, the provision of fronthaul connections to these small cells at a reasonable cost is a big concern for mobile operators especially when fronthaul link requires high capacity. Therefore, in this work, we present the hybrid fronthaul approach for C-RAN architecture based on Passive Optical Network (PON) and Free Space Optics (FSO) to enhance flexibility and minimize deployment costs of fronthaul network. The paper aims to examine the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of fronthaul networks taking into account both capital expenditure and operational expenditure costs, moreover, the efficacy of our proposed model is also analyzed by using optisystem simulator. The proposed model, in terms of TCO, is compared with the standalone PON based fronthaul system in green field scenarios. The numerical results revealed that the hybrid PON-FSO based fronthaul solution can save up to 42.89% TCO associated with small cell fronthaul architecture.