WHITE PAPER
Five Key Wireline Network
Improvements Needed for 5G
5G is not just about the Radio Access Network (RAN). Next-generation wireless is
going to need a lot of help from wireline technologies to deliver on its promises.
Since the introduction of cellular telephones in the 1980s,
wireless technologies have gone through a major evolution on
about a 10-year cycle. The main feature of the first generation
was analog voice; in the second, 2G, voice went digital; 3G
included data access; and the fourth generation—what is
available in highly industrialized countries today—features
very-high speed data and the introduction of end-to-end IP
networking technology.
These network upgrades were necessary to address
increasing bandwidth demand from end-users and allow for
new services to be offered over the network. As every service
provider knows, bandwidth requirements continue to climb by
an average of 45 percent every year, and this demand will be
compounded by the billions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices
connecting to the network in the next few years. In addition,
service providers are looking for ways to increase revenues
and compete with over-the-top players. These are some of the
main factors driving the next mobile standard, known as 5G.
Unlike previous evolutions, 5G will work alongside and
supplement 4G rather than outright replace it. While the
standard has not been finalized, it is expected that 5G will
feature data rates 100 times faster than currently available,
with 10 times lower latency. Together, these two attributes will
enable countless new services, applications, and business
models. When combined with all the newly connected IoT
devices, models show that upwards of 1,000 times more
data will flow across 5G networks.
Ask an end-user about how their phone connects to the
network, and they might only talk about cellular or wireless
technology, which is also where most of the 5G industry hype
has focused. The reality is that the RAN only makes
up a small portion of the total path that data from a connected
device must travel to provide connectivity. Therefore, if 5G
RAN is to offer exponentially higher speeds and capacity, the
rest of the network—the wireline network—must also adjust
proportionately to accommodate these changes.
This paper outlines five key areas within the wireline network
that will need to be upgraded to support 5G.
One: Fronthaul
Fronthaul is an architecture to connect remote radio heads to
centralized baseband units where the baseband processing
takes place. It is the transport component of Cloud RAN
(C-RAN). Traditionally, baseband units that process signals are
located at the base of large cell towers, connected to the radio
heads on top of the towers by copper cables. These copper
connections are being replaced by fiber because it is lighter,
more power-efficient, less expensive, and more resilient to the
elements. Fiber also supports far longer distances and much
higher transmission rates, giving network operators the ability
to centralize multiple geographically separated baseband units
from multiple towers into a single physical location.
Centralization unlocks multiple benefits for service providers,
including intelligent traffic coordination between multiple
remote radios, a single secure site to manage, and access to
web-scale benefits from centralizing the processing functions.
Why ‘network slicing’ is key
to 5G network adoption
Read now
The most popular protocol used to connect the radio heads
and the centralized baseband is Common Public Radio
Interface (CPRI), which is an open specification rather than
an official standard. CPRI has many issues that need to be
addressed to support 5G. First, different wireless vendors
have implemented it differently, making it difficult to mix
radio heads with centralized baseband units from different
manufacturers. Second, CPRI was initially designed to facilitate
communications from the top of the tower to the bottom,
not kilometers away to remote baseband units, and it has
latency requirements. This translates into theoretical distance
limitations—approximately 20 to 30 km between the remote
radio heads and baseband units, but more likely 5 to 10 km in
the real world.
The main issue with CPRI, however, is that the protocol is
basically an extended backplane, without any compression or
other techniques applied to decrease data traffic. This means
if a connected device is downloading data at 150 Mb/s, it
actually generates upwards of 2.5 Gb/s of traffic between the
remote radio head and the baseband unit. Service providers
wanting to offer 1 to 10 Gb/s speeds to connected devices with
5G would require hundreds of Gb/s of capacity to each cell site,
which is unworkable.
As a result, the industry is examining numerous technologies
to replace CPRI and reduce the data rates down to something
much more practical (and economical). In addition, if the CPRI
replacement is a formal industry standard, network operators
will not be locked into one transport solution vendor and can
leverage a wider supply chain and best-in-breed technologies.
Two: Scalability
5G promises to make available to the end-user a massive
amount of bandwidth that will need to be aggregated and placed
on the wireline networks. Because it is mobile traffic, bandwidth
growth will be harder to model, as it will shift depending on the
location of people or devices at any given time.
On the RAN side, for example, today’s 4G macro cell typically
has a 1 Gb/s physical connection, of which 200 to 300 Mb/s is
being used at any given time. A 20Mhz 5G MIMO antenna array
would need 64 Gb/s per sector, and three sectors per cell site
would generate nearly 200 Gb/s of traffic. Going from 200 to
300 Mb/s today to upwards of 64 Gb/s with 5G is a massive
increase in fronthaul traffic.
On the backhaul side, mobile network operators who offer LTE
Advanced are able—on paper, at least—to provide speeds of
up to 100 Mb/s to roughly 75 percent of their sites, 500 Mb/s
to 20 percent, and 1 Gb/s to 5 percent. Real-world speeds are
probably not so robust. A model of 5G specifications, however,
can assume 75 percent of the sites will get 500 Mb/s, 20 percent
at 1 Gb/s, and 5 percent at 10 Gb/s. This will create an order of
magnitude increase in backhaul traffic generated that will need
to be aggregated and delivered to the wireline network.
All that bandwidth increase in both the fronthaul and
backhaul network will be passed along to the metro and
regional networks as it transmits to and from those data
centers. The answer to this issue is fiber, and a lot of it.
Three: Densification
It no secret that coverage improves as devices get closer to a
cell or radio antenna, and a better signal improves download
speeds. Today’s macro cells are in big towers that serve a
20 to 30 km radius. Coverage already degrades indoors with
4G, a situation that will worsen with 5G because it uses much
higher radio frequencies that do not travel as far or penetrate
obstacles as well as the lower 4G frequencies.
Therefore, network operators must make the cells much
smaller and move them closer to the end-users to enable those
bandwidth gains. These will come in the form of user-deployed
indoor cells—known as femto, micro, and pico cells—as well
as operator-deployed indoor and outdoor cells. The latter
are typically called metro or small cells, and are deployed in
locations such as lampposts, the sides of buildings, inside
shopping malls, or inside sports stadiums.
All these small cells must be aggregated, typically fed to an
existing macro cell site, and then sent to the mobile switching
center and onward to the data center. The capacity of each
of the tens of millions of new small cells is such that each will
require a fiber backhaul connection. There will be some radio
backhaul in cases where the network operator cannot get right
of way or it is impractical, but fiber will be the preferred option
due to its inherent security, capacity, and ability to scale. Score
two for fiber.
Four: Virtualization
Virtualization has allowed network operators to move from
custom networking appliances to virtual applications that run
over x86 servers that can be moved around the mobile network
depending on the application required.
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Enhanced mobile broadband, for example, could have a cloud-
evolved packet core sitting in a metro hub site, cloud RAN at an
aggregation site, and numerous antenna sites with IP optical
back to the access point feeding into the data center via the
Internet. This is essentially today’s broadband mobile network
architecture, on steroids.
For ultra-reliability and low latency, however, network operators
could move much of the network closer to the radios. A shorter
path to process the data over less network equipment will
produce much lower latency and much higher reliability.
Ciena Insights: 5G mobile networks
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Alternatively, managing the expected explosion in traffic from
IoT devices such as temperature sensors or other devices
that do not require high availability or low latency would benefit
from a different approach. Network operators could create a
more centralized environment, moving cloud RAN and cloud
Evolved Packet Core (EPC) into a large centralized location and
accessing the benefits of economies of scale as a result.
Soft slicing – This uses technologies such as segment
routing, Ethernet VPN, and IP VPNs, combined with stat muxing
technologies to share resources. Some resource contention is
expected with this approach, but it is ideal for less-demanding
applications and would be less expensive than hard slicing.
Flex slicing – This combines hard and soft slicing by sharing
dedicated resources among users, including hard-sliced
network segments, provided SLA guarantees are maintained.
A final point
Identifying all the wireline technology required to support 5G
is fairly straightforward, and much of it is being developed
and finalized by vendors and standards bodies right now. It is
another question entirely, however, whether the industry has
the human resources capacity to adopt and integrate all these
technologies. Fronthaul technology has to be learned and
adopted. Densification will mean putting up a lot more cells.
Virtualization will require a range of SDN and NFV concepts,
and network slicing is almost a completely new concept
requiring new competencies yet to be developed. While this
paper cannot provide a complete how-to guide, it does point
to a number of competencies network operators will need to
bolster to support the next great evolution.

Five: Network Slicing

Many of the use cases for 5G will all use the network in very Visit the Ciena Community
different ways. For example, streaming very high-definition Get answers to your questions
video over mobile broadband, telemedicine applications
connecting to a mobile network using WiFi access, or low-
capacity and periodic access from an IoT device will all have
their own requirements in terms of speed, latency, availability,
packet loss, and more.

Network operators will want to support all these types of

applications on a common infrastructure, each will require
distinct and guaranteed Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and
each will need to be orchestrated from end to end. Providing
different network attributes to different applications requires
network operators to perform what is known as network slicing,
which can be performed using different approaches:

Hard slicing – A specific network instance (such as

wavelength, Optical Transport Network [OTN], or FlexE channel)
is dedicated to a specific application or a specific customer.
For example, a network operator may dedicate an OTN
channel to a fire department so it can be guaranteed the same
performance, availability, and reliability it has from a private
cellular network.

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