Reconfigurable Fiber Wireless Fronthaul With A-RoF and D-RoF Co-Existence Through a Si3N4 ROADM for Heterogeneous Mmwave 5G C-RANs

• DOI: 10.1109/jlt.2022.3179636
• Publication Date: 2022-06-02T19:37:59Z
• Authors: Eugenio Ruggeri; Christos Vagionas; Ronis Maximidis; George Kalfas; Dimosthenis Spaso...; Nikos Terzenidis; Ruud M. Oldenbeuving; Paul W. L. van Dijk; Chris G. H. Roelo...; Nikos Pleros; Amalia Miliou
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Towards enabling bandwidth-hungry 5G applications, a Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) mobile fronthaul architecture is experimentally presented supporting the co-existence of spectrally efficient analog transport formats with Digital Radio over Fiber schemes, combined millimeter wave (mmWave) high-capacity wireless channels. Flexible network reconfiguration proposed by means low-loss 1 × 4 Si <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub> N xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">4</sub> Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) on TriPleX platform, selectively dropping four FiWi mmWave links to different antenna location. Detailed investigations system are reported, including frequency characterization, multi-stage EVM penalty study and analog/digital traffic coexistence PHY layer feasibility. Following, 10 Gb/s multi-band 16-QAM WDM IFoF transmitted through 10km fiber 1-m directional V-band antennas flexibly reconfigured ROADM, achieving record 40 wavelength-routed capacity for 5G, while simultaneously meeting multiple Use Cases within 3GPP requirements.