Resilience-throughput-power trade-off in future 5G photonic networks

Abstract

5G New Radio allows operators to use new and wider spectrum and complements Long-Term Evolution networks with higher data rates and lower latency. Supporting such requirements in the transport network is not only a technological challenge, but a financial one as well. The use of high-frequency or unlicensed spectrum and cell densification for capacity increases call for adoption of small cells. This means that the transport network needs to connect a large number of devices, which leads to high deployment costs. Improving resilience by redundancy would further inflate these cost. In this paper, we examine the prospect of enhancing resilience via an interleaved photonic transport network as well as by the cooperation of multiple operators. Resilience is quantified by the decrease in availability in case of a failure. Furthermore, we also investigate the case when the number of active cells is reduced not by failure, but due to deliberate switch-off in order to save power.