Optical X-haul options for 5G fixed wireless access: Which one to choose?

© 2018 IEEE. 5G is anticipated to be a significant leap in the evolution of mobile communication. Being designed to facilitate 10 to 100 times more capacity than 4G, 5G is considered to be the most cost-efficient solution to provide Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) to households on a large scale where providing last mile access using wired solution might not be economically viable. With a range of promises to deliver user experience improvements, facilitating cost-efficient data transportation between FWA users and network core still remains an unsolved issue, given the enormous volume of data that will be traversing the superior 5G network. This work addresses this compelling problem by formulating a joint-optimization framework to plan and analyze the optimal deployment of diverse optical x-haul strategies that can be used in 5G-based FWA networks. The work provides a cornerstone for deployment strategies that will be imperative to realize future-proof FWA network.