Assessment of future backhaul and fronthaul networks for HetNet architectures

Mobile traffic is heavily increasing in the last years and a massive continuous growth is forecasted for the next decade. To cope with this significant traffic increase in mobile networks and the further evolving competitive market situation, operators are looking for solutions to increase the capacity of their mobile networks, while keeping the cost low. Besides enhancements of mobile radio technology and adding new spectrum to the existing sites, densification of radio sites, by so called small cells, is considered as a very promising option to increase capacity. Adding small cells to the already existing macro cell layer lead to heterogeneous networks (HetNet). Because of the scarce radio spectrum it is most likely that the radio sites in HetNets will use the same frequencies and therefore create interferences. To mitigate this impact different coordination methods have been proposed creating new challenging requirements on the transport network compared to today´s backhaul. Cost effective and scalable transport solutions are an important fundament for wide and successful deployment of HetNets. This paper investigates and assesses techno-economically different architectures for backhaul and fronthaul transport of existing and newly deployed radio sites in HetNet architectures taking requirements from interference co-ordination into account.