WDM/OTN----An Excellent Choice For 5G Bearer Technology
"5G commercial, bearer first", bearer network is an important foundation of 5G commercial, 5G bearer has become a hot topic in the industry. At present, the three major operators and many equipment vendors have taken active actions in 5G bearer.
5G fronthaul faces the challenge of shortage of optical fiber resources
At the "2017 Optical Communication Technology and Development Forum" held on September 6, experts from the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, FiberHome and other experts expressed their views on 5G bearer. Among them, the OTN-based 5G bearer solution of China Telecom introduced by Li Junjie, director of the Optical Communication Research Center of China Telecom Beijing Research Institute, is particularly eye-catching.
The 5G fronthaul is facing the challenge of the shortage of optical fiber resources. In the early stage of 5G, low-frequency networking is adopted, and the fiber resources required for 3G/4G/5G co-sites are accumulated. In the mature stage of 5G, high-frequency networking or low-frequency addition is required, and more fiber resources need to be added. . In response to this challenge, WDM technology is an effective technical means to solve the problem of fronthaul.
For the medium/backhaul bearer network, OTN has natural large bandwidth, hard pipes, and has both optical layer one-hop direct access and OTN delay optimization and evolution capabilities, as well as rich management and operation and maintenance mechanisms. The end-to-end OTN networking has the best Strong competitive advantage.
In the early stage of 5G, the edge interconnection traffic was small, but the access services were diverse and the granularity was diversified. Enhanced packet OTN is based on a high-bandwidth hard pipe, which combines the advantages of OTN and packet processing to meet the diversified requirements of edge DC access services.
In the 5G mid-term, local business traffic gradually increases, and part of the DCI moves down. At this time, the DCI network is divided into two layers. On the basis of enhanced packet OTN interconnection, it is necessary to combine the optical layer ROADM for Mesh interconnection between edge DCs.
In the later stage of 5G, network data traffic is huge, and business scheduling needs to be carried out across the entire network. A large number of high-dimensional ROADMs may need to be deployed across the entire network to achieve all-optical connections between edge DCs and core DCs to meet low-latency business requirements.
In the 5G era, there will be trends such as an increase in the number of base stations, separate deployment of CU and DU, and network cloudification. Therefore, flexible and scalable routing and forwarding functions will occur. At the same time, the 5G network is dominated by north-south traffic, with limited east-west traffic. Bandwidth and delay are core competitiveness. The optical layer needs to enhance core performance to meet flexibility requirements.
