A Novel 5G Indoor Service Provisioning Architecture

This paper introduces a novel distributed antenna access architecture for achieving a cost-effective solution of 5G indoor service provisioning. The proposed architecture takes advantage of multi-pair local area network (LAN) cables to support simultaneous transmission of multiple baseband and intermediate frequency (IF) signals between the remote radio unit (RRU) and each distributed antenna unit (DAU), so as to meet the massive antenna requirements and overcome the non-line-of-sight nature of the indoor environment with extremely low cost. Two new functional modules, namely Multi-Pair Air-to-Cable (MP-A2C) and DeFEXTer, are defined at the RRU for the purpose of resource mapping between the antenna signals and the LAN cable sub-channels, as well as the mitigation of far end crosstalk (FEXT) due to the signal traversal along the LAN cable. We will discuss in detail the proposed system architecture and enumerate the research issues.