Mobile WDM Backhaul Network Designs for LTE-Advanced and Beyond Systems

This invited paper describes about mobile wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) backhaul network designs for future radio access networks. First, it introduces mobile backhaul requirements to support LTE-Advanced and Beyond with emphasis on coordinated multipoints (CoMP) techniques. It primarily considers WDM passive optical networks (WDM-PON) as promising optical access technologies for mobile backhaul access networks. It also presents two proposals that enhance backhaul capability for CoMP. One is to realize physical X2 links in WDM-PON, which are capable of establishing a dedicated high capacity and low latency optical links between base stations (BSs). The other is to enable multicasting in WDM-PON and it potentially reduces time to exchange control/data among BSs for CoMP. Simulation results verify that the proposed physical X2 links and multicasting enable more BSs to join cooperation by enhancing backhaul capability, resulting in improved user throughput by CoMP. Keywords— Mobile backhaul networks, wavelength division multiplexing passive optical networks (WDM-PON), Coordinated multipoints (CoMP)