Multicore fiber opportunities for Centralized Radio Access Networks

Radio-over-fiber architectures conceived for the next generation of wireless access systems are based on Centralized Radio Access Networks (C-RAN), where the baseband processing resources corresponding to different remote base stations (BS) are hosted in a shared central office (CO). We propose the exploitation of the unique features brought by the inherent parallelism of multicore fibers as a compact solution to implement the required CO-BS connectivity in C-RANs.