Reliable and Low-Latency Fronthaul for Tactile Internet Applications

TL;DR

This paper enhances the reliability and reduces the latency of packet-based fronthaul networks in 5G by employing multi-path diversity and erasure coding, addressing challenges posed by multi-hop Ethernet infrastructure for tactile internet applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining multi-path diversity and erasure coding to improve fronthaul performance in 5G networks, validated through analytical and numerical studies.

Findings

Improved reliability-latency trade-off with multi-path diversity and erasure coding.

Analytical model predicting latency and reliability in fronthaul networks.

Numerical validation showing benefits for coexistence of eMBB and URLLC services.

Abstract

With the emergence of Cloud-RAN as one of the dominant architectural solutions for next-generation mobile networks, the reliability and latency on the fronthaul (FH) segment become critical performance metrics for applications such as the Tactile Internet. Ensuring FH performance is further complicated by the switch from point-to-point dedicated FH links to packet-based multi-hop FH networks. This change is largely justified by the fact that packet-based fronthauling allows the deployment of FH networks on the existing Ethernet infrastructure. This paper proposes to improve reliability and latency of packet-based fronthauling by means of multi-path diversity and erasure coding of the MAC frames transported by the FH network. Under a probabilistic model that assumes a single service, the average latency required to obtain reliable FH transport and the reliability-latency trade-off are first investigated. The analytical results are then validated and complemented by a numerical study that accounts for the coexistence of enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency (URLLC) services in 5G networks by comparing orthogonal and non-orthogonal sharing of FH resources.