Optical network evolution for 5G mobile applications and SDN-based control

The tight connection between advanced mobile techniques and optical networking has already been made by emerging cloud radio access network architectures, wherein fiber-optic links to/from remote cell sites have been identified as the leading high-speed, low-latency connectivity solution. By taking such fiber-optic mobile fronthaul networks as the reference case, this paper will consider their scaling to meet 5G demands as driven by key 5G mobile techniques, including massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and coordinated multipoint (CoMP), network densification via small/pico/femto cells, device-to-device (D2D) connectivity, and an increasingly heterogeneous bring-your-own-device (BYOD) networking environment. Ramifications on mobile fronthaul signaling formats, optical component selection and wavelength management, topology evolution and network control will be examined, highlighting the need to move beyond raw common public radio interface (CPRI) solutions, support all wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optics types, enable topology evolution towards a meshed architecture, and adopt a software-defined networking (SDN)-based network control plane. The proposed optical network evolution approaches are viewed as opportunities for both optimizing user-side quality-of-experience (QoE) and monetizing the underlying optical network.