An Experimental Set-up and Performance Evaluation of EPON-Based 5G RAN Architecture Enabled by Distributed Network Control Management

The multifaceted technological boom as driven by mobile and IoT devices requires more bandwidth by the day. Some applications such as gaming and real-time streaming services in ultra-high definition have higher bandwidth as well low latency requirement. The only viable solution for these data hungry applications is fiber-wireless (FiWi) network architecture. Though numerous hybrid Fiber-Wireless network architectures have been expected to utilize the fiber-based Passive Optical Network (PON) access infrastructure to backhaul mobile traffic, most of these architectures, however, have utilized the typically centralized tree-based PON topology, which can only support a centralized Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture. A converged PON-5G access infrastructure must be capable of supporting a distributed architecture as well as distributed Network Control and Management (NCM) operations. The major weakness is that mainstream PONs are typically deployed as tree topologies and the tree-based topology can neither support the distributed access architecture nor intercommunication among the access nodes (ONUs) attached to the PON. In this study we devise a fully distributed Ring-Based EPON architecture that enables the support of a converged PON-5G LTE access networking transport infrastructure utilizing distributed network control management to seamlessly backhaul both mobile and wireline multimedia traffic and services. An experimental set-up is also employed to measure BER and eye diagram of the proposed architecture.