• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.849-854
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• 2016

5G New Radio Access Technology(: RAT) is studied by many researchers because the current radio frequency is insufficient to accommodate the increased mobile communication data traffic. However, there are few researches to study on the issue whether the wired mobile network can accommodate the new RAT. Therefore, in the paper, the study on the issue whether the Radio over Fiber(: RoF) system can accommodate the new RATs such as millimeter wave communication, terahertz communication, and optical wireless communication. As a result of the study, only millimeter wave communication deserve to be considered in ten years and even RoF system may not support the increased bandwidth of the millimeter wave communication when beamforming is used.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.10
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• pp.4618-4639
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• 2018

One of the most innovative paradigms for the next-generation of wireless cellular networks is the cloud-radio access networks (C-RANs). In C-RANs, base station functions are distributed between the remote radio heads (RHHs) and base band unit (BBU) pool, and a communication link is defined between them which is referred as the fronthaul. This leveraging link is expected to reduce the CAPEX (capital expenditure) and OPEX (operating expense) of envisioned cellular architectures as well as improves the spectral and energy efficiencies, provides the high scalability, and efficient mobility management capabilities. The fronthaul link carries the baseband signals between the RRHs and BBU pool using the digital radio over fiber (RoF) based common public radio interface (CPRI). CPRI based optical links imposed stringent synchronization, latency and throughput requirements on the fronthaul. As a result, fronthaul becomes a hinder in commercial deployments of C-RANs and is seen as one of a major bottleneck for backbone networks. The optimization of fronthaul is still a challenging issue and requires further exploration at industrial and academic levels. This paper comprehensively summarized the current challenges and requirements of fronthaul networks, and discusses the recently proposed system architectures, virtualization techniques, key transport technologies and compression schemes to carry the time-sensitive traffic in fronthaul networks.