wdm technologies for 5g carrying network
DESCRIPTION
The article mainly introduces WDM technologies for 5G Carrying Network, and the current 5G fronthaul transmission proposal used by Chinese operators: MWDM, LWDM transmission wavelengths and implementation solutions. Click for more: https://bit.ly/3izMbW7TRANSCRIPT
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WDM Technologies for 5G Carrying Network
5G Application Scenarios
The development of 5G networks starting in 2019 is generally believed to bring
changes not limited to people’s daily life. It will support the evolution of Internet from
mobile internet to intelligent internet, which will influence the industrial-ecology
deeply.
The international standard organization 3GPP defined the three main application
scenarios of 5G: eMBB (Enhance Mobile Broadband), uRLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low
Latency Communications), mMTC (Massive Machine Type Communication). eMBB
requires the bandwidth experienced by the customers to be more than 1Gbps supporting
mobile broadband surfaces such as 3D and ultra-high definition video. uRLLC requires
the transmitting delay to be <1ms supporting real time applications such as self-driving
cars, industrial automation, and remote surgery. mMTC means application in massive
internet of things (IOT) which requires high density terminal connection of more than
one million per square kilometer.
Structure of the 5G Carrying Network
Build the carrying network before commercial application of 5G. In order to support
the aforementioned three application scenarios, the carrying network based on optical
fiber is required to be reconstructed. Fig.1 shows a typical structure for 5G carrying
network, which usually consists of metro access network, metro aggregation network,
metro core network and inter-province backbone network. Considering investigation
and operating cost, the radio access network (RAN) of 4G usually employs D-RAN
(distributed wireless access) structure based on function division of RRU+BBU, while
the 5G system employs C-RAN (centralized or clouded wireless access) structure based
on function division of AAU+DU+CU.
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Fig.1 Structure of 5G carrying network
The interconnection between the nodes of 5G carrying network is realized through
optical transceiver modules and optical fibers. The interconnection between the
wireless base station and DU is defined as front-haul. The interconnection between DU
and CU is defined as mid-haul. The interconnection between CU and the metro core
network is defined as back-haul. The front-haul distance is usually <10/20km and the
bit rate of the data interface is 10/25/100Gbps. The mid-haul distance is usually
<40km and the bit rate is 25/50/100Gbps. The back-haul distance is usually 40-80km
and the bit rate is usually 100/N×100Gbps. The transmitting span of the trans-provincial
backbone network is usually hundreds of kilometers and the bit rate is
N×100/200/400Gbps.
Fig.2 The front-haul, mid-haul and back-haul link of the 5G carrying network
Comparing to the 4G network, the frequency of 5G signal is higher and thus the
coverage of a single base station is less. Thus the base stations needed by 5G network
is 2-3 times of those by 4G network. C-RAN structure is preferred in the front-haul and
mid-haul of 5G network, instead of D-RAN in 4G. There are mainly three advantages
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for C-RAN. Firstly, the required number of terminal equipment rooms and transmitting
equipments is reduced. Thus the cost for station address acquisition, equipment room
renting, and data transmission is reduced. Theoretically, the more is the DUs
concentrated, the cost down is more. Secondly, the concentrated deployment of DUs
facilitates the maintenance. Thus the cost for equipment room construction, equipment
maintenance, and power rate is much lower than D-RAN. Thus C-RAN is regarded as
the main deployment mode of 5G front-haul network. Thirdly, the DUs are grouped and
deployed in a DU pool, or in clouded deployment. Thus the baseband resources can be
shared and service cooperation between stations is realized.
Consideration for the Choice of Transmitting Technologies
Optical fiber transmission is widely employed in telecom backbone network and data
centers. In order to improve the transmission capacity, WDM technologies are
commonly used. However, the concrete transmission technologies are diverse facing
different application scenarios. The main factors influencing the choice are power loss
and chromatic dispersion of the fiber link. The laser sources (with modulators included)
and photon detectors (PDs) are important for the cost of the transmission system and
should be considered in choice of proposals. What’s more, the heritage of industrial
chain also influence the cost and is one of the factors to be considered.
The spectral transmission loss of the common quartz fiber is shown in Fig.3. Its first,
second and third transmission windows are centered at 850nm, 1310nm and 1550nm.
850nm is the wavelength selected by the first multimode fiber (MMF) communication
system. 1310nm is the zero dispersion wavelength of the conventional single mode fiber
(SMF) G.652. As shown in Fig.4(a), the material dispersion and waveguide dispersion
counteracts at this wavelength. 1550nm is the wavelength experiencing the lowest loss
for quartz fiber. G.655 SMF was developed with its zero dispersion wavelength set with
a small shift from 1550nm, as shown in Fig.4(b). Thus low dispersion is obtained at
1550nm-band and non-linear effects, such as four-wave mixing and cross-phase
modulation, are avoided.
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Fig.3 Spectral transmission loss of quartz fiber
Fig.4 Spectral dispersion of G.652 and G.655 optical fibers
In the engineering applications, the second and third windows in Fig.3 are usually
called O-band and C-band, respectively. In order to extend the available transmission
band, S-band and L-band are developed neighboring to C-band. What’s more, the
water peak around 1385nm (due to OH- absorption) is cut down by further purification
of quartz fiber. Thus E-band is developed and the transmission band of quartz fiber is
extended to 1260~1620nm. The bandwidth is totally 360nm and the optical fiber is
called all-wave fiber.
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The optical fiber communication system usually employs semi-conductor lasers as
the light source. The emission from a semi-conductor laser is not an ideal
monochromatic light. It has a certain linewidth. The different wavelength components
transmit in different velocity due to dispersion and thus bit error is introduced in high-
speed, long-haul transmission system. Optical signals in different bit rate have different
dispersion tolerance, as shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Dispersion tolerance for optical signals in different bit rate
Bit rate 10Gbps 40Gbps 100Gbps
Dispersion Tolerance 1000ps 60ps 10ps
The early transmission system in low bit rate usually employ FP lasers with low cost
and broader linewidth. However, DFB lasers are necessary for high-speed transmission
systems with bit rate ≥10Gbps. When the transmission distance is not too much, people
intend to modulate the DFB lasers directly, which are called DML (Direct Modulated
Laser) lasers. Direct modulation on the lasers generates chirp effect and broadens the
linewidth, which introduces more chromatic dispersion. In order to avoid broadening
the linewidth of the lasers to transmit longer distance, external modulation is employed.
An EAM (Electro-absorption Modulation) modulator is cascaded behind the laser. The
DFB+EAM combination is called EML laser. In order to transmit ever longer distance,
LN (Lithium Niobate) modulator is required, which is an electro-optical modulator with
Math-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer structure.
Transmission Proposal for Different Application Scenarios
The focus of 5G investment is development of the front-haul and mid-haul networks.
The investment is too much and exceeds the affordability of a single telecom operator.
China Unicom and China Telecom decide to develop a 5G front-haul network together,
while China Mobile cooperates with China Radio and television network Cooperation.
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A wireless base station should be equipped with upload/download interfaces for three
sectors. Under the co-construction and sharing mode, the bandwidth demand for a
single base station is doubled and thus six 25G interfaces are required for a 5G base
station. For the deployment scenario where 4G and 5G equipments share a base station,
12 front-haul interfaces are required. In some multi-service access region, bandwidth
demand is much higher and 24 front-haul interfaces are required for a single base station.
Based on above application scenarios, base stations with 12 interfaces will become the
main-stream construction in the 5G front-haul network.
In the 4G front-haul network, BBU is set near to RRU and D-RAN configuration is
more adopted. The mostly employed transmission proposal is fiber direct driving.
While in the 5G front-haul network, DU is deployed far from AAU. The cost of optical
fiber is too much and thus xWDM is popular to save fiber resources. According to the
application scenarios and based on the deployed fiber resources, the configurations of
5G front-haul networks can be D-RAN, C-RAN small aggregation and C-RAN massive
aggregation, as shown in Fig.5. In the D-RAN deployment, fiber direct driving proposal
is selected. BiDi (bi-directional transmission in and single fiber) transmission is
suggested to save half of the fiber resources, as shown in Fig.6. In C-RAN small
aggregation deployment, six 25G interfaces are required and 6-λ CWDM transmission
is proposed, as shown in Fig.7.
Fig.5 The deployment configurations of 5G front-haul network
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Fig. 6 Fiber direct driving proposal for front-haul network
Fig.7 6-λ CWDM proposal for 5G front-haul network
In C-RAN massive aggregation deployment, each wireless base station requires 12
high-speed optical interfaces. China Mobile presented a 12-λ MWDM proposal. The
12 wavelengths are listed in Table 2. Based on the 6-λ CWDM laser chips, the emission
wavelengths are shifted by 3.5nm to the left and right through TEC tuning. Thus 12
wavelengths are obtained based on the current industrial chain for data transmission.
China Telecom selected the 12-λ LWDM proposal. The channel spacing is 800GHz.
The 12 wavelengths are listed in Table 3. TEC is required to stabilize the emission
wavelength of the laser sources because the wavelength pitch is only 4.3-4.7nm. The
power consumption of the optical transceiver module is about 0.5W higher due to the
introduction of TEC module.
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Table 2. CWDM/MWDMtransmission wavelengths and proposals
CWDM
(nm)
Proposal MWDM
(nm) Proposal
Share of
industrial chain
1271 DML+PIN
1271±3.5 1267.5 DML+PIN+TEC
Share CWDM4
industrial chain
for data
transmission
DML+PIN 1274.5 DML+PIN+TEC
1291 DML+PIN
1291±3.5 1287.5 DML+PIN+TEC
DML+PIN 1294.5 DML+PIN+TEC
1311 DML+PIN
1311±3.5 1307.5 DML+PIN+TEC
DML+PIN 1314.5 DML+PIN+TEC
1331 DML+PIN
1331±3.5 1327.5 DML+PIN+TEC
DML+PIN 1334.5 DML+PIN+TEC
1351 DML+APD
1351±3.5 1347.5 DML+APD+TEC
DML+APD 1354.5 DML+APD+TEC
1371 DML+APD
1371±3.5 1367.5 DML+APD+TEC
DML+APD 1374.5 DML+APD+TEC
Table 3. LWDM transmission wavelengths and proposals
Channel LWDM Proposal Share of industrial chain
1 1269.23 DML+PIN+TEC
2 1273.54 DML+PIN+TEC Share 400G LR8
industrial chain for data
transmission
3 1277.89 DML+PIN+TEC
4 1282.26 DML+PIN+TEC
5 1286.66 DML+PIN+TEC
6 1291.10 DML+PIN+TEC
7 1295.56 DML+PIN+TEC Share 100G LR4
industrial chain for data
transmission
8 1300.05 DML+PIN+TEC
9 1304.58 DML+PIN+TEC
10 1309.14 DML+PIN+TEC
11 1313.73 DML+PIN+TEC
12 1318.35 DML+PIN+TEC
The different WDM wavelengths and dispersion spectrum of quartz are shown in
Fig.8. The latter two wavelengths of 6-λ CWDM is far from the zero-dispersion
wavelength 1310nm. In order to compensate for the power loss cost due to dispersion,
APD photon detectors are employed which have higher sensitivity. Thus we can see,
for the CWDM transmission proposal in Table 2, the laser sources and PDs choose
DML+PIN for the former wavelengths, while DML+APD for the latter two
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wavelengths. For the same reason, the latter four wavelengths of MWDM also employ
DML+APD.
Fig. 8 Chromatic dispersion spectrum of optical fiber and WDM proposals for 5G
front-haul network
Table 2 and 3 list different WDM transmission proposals for 5G front-haul
network, together with the sharing of the current industrial chain in data transmission
(for data centers). WDM technologies were first applied in telecom mainly for long-
haul transmission in the backbone networks and core networks. DWDM transmission
in C-band (1530-1570nm) is preferred because the transmission loss of quartz fiber is
the lowest at this band. However, the optical devices for this industrial chain are
expensive. With the development of mobile internet and the construction of massive
data centers, optical fiber transmission technologies are widely employed, which
become the second and ever larger blue-ocean market of optical fiber communication
technologies. The transmission distance in data centers are relatively short (comparing
to telecom applications), while the data transmission speed is higher. The aim of
transmission proposals is focused on solution of dispersion restrictions, which is
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different from loss restriction in telecom long-haul network.
The current 5G front-haul network is part of the telecom network, while its
application scenarios are different from those of telecom long-haul network. It is similar
to the applications in data centers. The transmission is characterized by high-speed and
short distance, which is mainly restricted by chromatic dispersion. Thus the
transmission wavelengths are selected in O-band centered at 1310nm. CWDM4,
LWDM transmissions in O-band have been widely deployed in data centers. The
industrial chains are mature and the cost is low. 5G front-haul network can share its
industrial chain to cut down the investment. For example, for the 6-λ CWDM proposal
in 5G front-haul network, the former 4 wavelengths can share the CWDM4 industrial
chain of data transmission. For the 12-λ MWDM proposal, the former 8 wavelengths
can also share the CWDM4 industrial chain. For the 12-λ LWDM proposal, the 2-5
wavelengths can share the 400G LR8 industrial chain and the 7-10 wavelengths can
share the 100G LR4 industrial chain.
Sharing the CWDM4 industrial chain for data transmission is one of the main
considerations why China Mobile projected MWDM proposal. The construction of 5G
network can be started as soon as possible with the cost under control.
In response to the new needs of 5G fronthaul applications, HYC quickly launched
MWDM and LWDM series products to make full use of O-band optical resources,
increase band utilization, and increase speed. HYC can provide customers with a full
range of WDM wavelength division multiplexing solutions, including CWDM,
DWDM, CCWDM, MWDM, LWDM products, etc.
HYC Co., Ltd has 20 years of R&D and manufacturing experience in the optical
communication industry, and has a certain influence in the global industry. It focuses
on providing customers with one-stop customization of the design, R&D and
manufacturing of passive optical devices. HYC has production lines including fiber
optic connectors, patch cords, PLC splitters, WDM wavelength division multiplexers,
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MEMS optical switches and so on. Products are widely used in FTTH, data centers, 5G
networks, and telecommunication networks.
www.hyc-system.com