Wavelength and Bandwidth Allocation for Mobile Fronthaul in TWDM-PON

Abstract

Time- and wavelength- division multiplexed passive optical network (TWDM-PON) has attracted considerable attention for the next generation optical access systems. Among potential applications of TWDM-PON, a major application is the support of mobile fronthaul streams between radio units (RUs) and distributed units (DUs) in the centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, which consists of central units (CUs), DUs, and RUs. The upstream fronthaul traffic that an optical line terminal (OLT) receives is expected to become highly bursty due to the variable data rate generated by employing new functional split options and the synchronization of data transmission between neighboring RUs caused by time-division duplex (TDD). However, there has been no wavelength and bandwidth allocation scheme for TWDM-PON that is designed to efficiently accommodate fronthaul streams satisfying the strict delay requirement. Therefore, in this paper we propose a novel wavelength and bandwidth allocation algorithm that can minimize the number of active wavelength channels considering the high burstiness and delay requirement of fronthaul data transmission. Through computer simulations it was confirmed that the number of active wavelength channels can be reduced by 50% with the proposed algorithm, and thus more RUs can be efficiently accommodated using TWDM-PON.