A Hierarchical Modulation Enabled SNR Allocable Delta-Sigma Digital Mobile Fronthaul System

Abstract

Internet of everything is being build up rapidly, which causes much higher requirements towards the flexibility of communication resources, especially the adaptivity of the fronthaul to various transmission distances and capacities. In this paper, we proposed a low-cost and spectrum efficient 5G fronthaul broadband connection solution that combines hierarchical modulation technology and delta-sigma modulation. The proposed scheme can double the number of accesses without occupying extra wavelengths. Moreover, such architecture can flexibly allocate the SNR of a group of remote radio units for different user requirement of transmission rate and reaches. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can increase the access distance of the fronthaul network by 23% and the capacity by 16.7%. The feasibility of the solution is verified through a proof-of-concept experiment. After 20 km transmission, the OFDM-64QAM and -256QAM signal with a center frequency of 3.5 GHz and a bandwidth of 500 MHz can meet the EVM requirements of 8% and 3.5%, respectively. And when the ${R_{LM}}$ of the hierarchical PAM4 signal is 0.6, the ROP required by the most-significant bit branch can be reduced by ∼1.5 dB.

Keywords

• Flexible fronthaul network
• hierarchical modulation (HM)
• signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) allocation
• delta-sigma modulation