Comparison of DSP-based TDMA and FDMA channel aggregation techniques in mobile fronthauling

Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is perceived as a future essential technology to satisfy the ever-increasing demand of mobile data traffic. Considerable research efforts are expending in the optimization of C-RAN architecture. In this paper, we perform a comparison of two DSP-based fronthauling techniques for aggregation of radio waveforms: time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA), in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM), spectral bandwidth efficiency and digital signal processing (DSP) complexity as a performance metrics. The two techniques are compared by means of simulation and validated experimentally on an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) optical fronthaul link capable of aggregating 48 and 96 LTE-A (20 MHz) channels. Moreover, we made simulation comparison on 24 (100 MHz) new radio (NR) waveforms which will be used in the upcoming 5G applications. We reveal that there is ~50% and ~20% spectral efficiency gain by TDMA aggregation on LTE-A and NR waveforms respectively. Hence TDMA gives slightly better performance in the case of 96 LTE-A channels which is attributed to slightly better linearity over the optical channel frequency response for larger number of channel. In addition, we show that TDMA is more efficient in terms of complexity than FDMA system that requires an additional pre-emphasis technique to equalize the overall per channel performance.