The 22nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC2016)
Study on Protocol and Required Bandwidth for 5G
Mobile Fronthaul in C-RAN Architecture with
MAC-PHY Split
Susumu Nishihara, Shigeru Kuwano, Kenji Miyamoto, Jun Terada, and Akihiro Ootaka
NTT Access Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT Corporation
1-1 Hikarinooka, Yokosuka, Kanagawa 239-0847, Japan
Email: nishihara.susumu@lab.ntt.co.jp
Abstract—We propose the use of Small Cell Forum application
program interface mapped over Radio over Ethernet frames
to realize a transport interface for mobile fronthaul where the
function of the base stations is split between MAC and PHY
layers for 5G mobile with a centralized radio access network
configuration. We confirmed that this approach successfully
reduced the bandwidth required for the fronthaul to less than
10 Gbit/s by numerical simulation when the wireless system
bandwidth was 600 Mbit/s for 16 streams per access point, owing
to the statistical multiplexing effect described in our proposal.
Index Terms—5G mobile, fronthaul, function split, Radio over
Ethernet, Small Cell Forum API
I. I NTRODUCTION
With the widespread use of many attractive digital devices
such as smartphones and tablet computers, digital environment
represented by social networking services including short-
message exchange with graphics and video chat using a
handset, and watching videos has now become part of our
daily lives. From the end-users’ perspective, such devices and
services are based on the wireless communications infrastruc-
ture of high-speed cellular and public/private WiFi networks as
opposed to conventional wireline networks. For example, it has
been reported that mobile traffic data will grow at a constant
annual rate of 53% and reach up to 30 exabytes in 2020 [?].
Against such a background, many mobile operators are eyeing
next-generation mobile systems known as 5G mobile that
will support the above-mentioned, ever-increasing user traffic
demand [?], [?]. With 5G mobile the carrier frequency will be
in a high frequency region of at least several GHz to realize
high-speed communication. One of the key technologies is
massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) antennas
at base stations that can utilize the nature of the higher-
frequency band where both attenuation and directivity are
high. When using a massive MIMO system with antenna
elements of more than one hundred, a precise beam forming
technique should be employed to compensate for the high
directivity, i.e. low coherency while utilizing the high-speed
transmission characteristics. Recent cellular systems adopt a
centralized/cloud radio access network (C-RAN) where the
function of the baseband unit (BBU) is aggregated, and many
remote radio heads (RRHs) are connected with the BBU by
optical fibers to configure a cost-effective point-to-multipoint
topology as shown in Fig. 1.
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Massive MIMO antennas
BBU
MFH
UE
RRH
Fig. 1. Network configuration for C-RAN.
This type of optical network for cellular systems is called
mobile fronthaul (MFH), and a common public radio interface
(CPRI) [?] has been used as a cost-effective interface for
MFH. However, the required optical capacity for MFH will
become very large in the 5G mobile era if CPRI is selected
as a fronthaul interface the way it used to be, making the
fronthaul cost high. In fact, the bit rate specified in CPRI has
increased to 24 Gbit/s, but the economic feasibility is currently
unclear as regards commercial adoption. As the split layer
becomes higher, the fronthaul capacity becomes smaller. For
example, splitting the function between the MAC and PHY
layers is a desirable option as described later in more detail.
In addition, MFH is expected to provide a way of transmitting
mobile traffic in a more standard and common manner and thus
realize cost-effectiveness and adapt to the characteristics of
packetized traffic with dynamic variation in its load according
to the actual usage when such a function split is applied. In
this paper, we propose using Small Cell Forum application
program interface (SCAPI) where the function of the base
stations is split between the MAC and PHY layers for 5G
mobile. We also propose that the traffic on MFH be carried by
using Radio over Ethernet (RoE) frames for cost-effectiveness
as well as interface conformity for packetized traffic with the
MAC-PHY split applied. We estimated the required optical
fronthaul capacity by using numerical simulations, and re-
vealed that our approach can successfully reduce the required
fronthaul capacity to about 10 Gbit/s thanks to the statistical
multiplexing effect where a cost-effective transport interface
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is commercially available. the transport mechanism of control and management signals

for equipment with massive MIMO functionality.
II. R EQUIREMENT FOR COST- EFFECTIVE MOBILE
FRONTHAUL FOR 5G MOBILE
A. Capacity reduction in MFH by function split RRC
A lot of research has dealt with splitting the function be- PDCP
tween BBU and RRH to reduce the required MFH capacity [?], PHY Control
RLC
[?], [?], [?], [?], [?], [?]. The key motivation behind the studies
is to reduce both the capacity and the cost required for MFH MAC
as explained later in more detail. In general, the physical rate
SCAPI
of MFH provided by CPRI is over ten times that of mobile
traffic, for example [?]. With 5G mobile, it is expected that the
PHY
bandwidth for each type of user equipment (UE) will increase
to about 10 Gbit/s. In addition, the number of connected
devices is estimated to be ten times that for 2010 [?]. Also, a Fig. 2. Protocol overview for SCAPI.
lower super-high-frequency (SHF) band will be assigned for
the carrier frequency where massive MIMO technology with
C. Standardization of Radio over Ethernet
more than one hundred antenna elements will be employed.
The required MFH capacity will increase in proportion to the In IEEE P1904.3, a protocol called Radio over Ethernet
wireless bandwidth and amount to several hundred Gbit/s if (RoE) has been discussed with the aim of standardizing the
we continue to select CPRI as the MFH interface because encapsulation mechanism and other technical items such as
the number of I/Q samples remains constant regardless of messages and TLVs to be exchanged between the C-RAN
the existence of actual mobile traffic. Such a situation is not and the antenna sites [?]. The frame format currently being
desirable and will not be economically acceptable in terms discussed in IEEE is shown in Fig. 3. RoE frames are assem-
of commercial deployment. Therefore, we can expect that a bled with control information, data, and timing information
function split will be employed to reduce the required capacity and mapped over IEEE802.3 Ethernet frames, and vice versa.
to around 10 Gbit/s or less for which a cost-effective transport And then the frames are physically transmitted on a certain
interface is commercially available. The split demarcation medium, i.e. an optical or electrical interface. This enables us
layer should be higher if the aim is to reduce the required to transmit mobile traffic over a common, widely used Ethernet
MFH capacity to around the same as that of the mobile interface, leading to cost-effective MFH.
bandwidth. For the reasons described above, a split between
the MAC-PHY layers is assumed in this work for a smaller Type/
Preamble SFD DA SA TPID TCI Payload FCS
MFH capacity. Length
IEEE802.3 Ethernet
B. Small Cell Forum API
An organization called the Small Cell Forum (SCF) is orderingInfo
ver pkt_type flow_id length
actively promoting the deployment of small cells. In one of a (timestamp/seqnum) payload
(2 bit) (6 bit) (8 bit) (1 bit)
set of documents released by SCF, the application program- (31 bit)
ming interface, or SCAPI, is described to define the interface IEEE P1904.3 RoE
between LTE L2/L3 software and L1 PHY [?]. SCAPI mainly
describes the “procedures” and “messages” that work between Fig. 3. Frame format discussed by IEEE P1904.3 task force.
LTE L2/L3 software and L1 PHY. There are two types of
procedures in SCAPI; configuration and subframe procedures.
III. T RANSPORT MECHANISM IN SCAPI MAPPING OVER
The configuration procedures deal with the management of
R ADIO OVER E THERNET
the PHY layer, while the subframe procedures are responsible
for the structure of each subframe and operate every 1 ms. A. Mapping of SCAPI over Radio over Ethernet
Similarly, there are two types of messages in SCAPI; configu- The function split between the MAC and PHY layers will
ration and subframe messages. The configuration messages are help to reduce the required MFH capacity. Also, traffic over
used by the L2/L3 software to control and configure the PHY, MFH using the above-mentioned function split is packetized
while the subframe messages are responsible for controlling and the required bandwidth will depend on the actual mobile
the data transmission or reception. The protocol procedures traffic, as opposed to a constant bitstream regardless of the
and messages that are used between the MAC and PHY layers existence of actual traffic provided by conventional CPRI. The
are defined in the form of hierarchized “type, length, and value function split between the MAC and PHY layers fits very well
” (TLV). A protocol overview for SCAPI is shown in Fig. with SCAPI, which deals with the API between PHY and
2. SCAPI has been discussed with a view to applying it to the above layers. However, SCAPI has been considered as an
equipment for LTE, but further study is required as regards interface that resides inside the equipment, and the transport

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 The 22nd Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC2016)
protocol between pieces of equipment has not been taken
into consideration. Ethernet is suitable for transporting such
packetized data because of the nature of the protocol, and will
contribute to a huge cost reduction as previously described.
Therefore, we propose mapping SCAPI over RoE frames to
apply it to transport as shown in Fig. 4 on the assumption that
the MAC-PHY split is adopted.
So far, only CPRI has concretely been discussed as a radio
signal carried by the RoE protocol, and no specific function
split has been taken into consideration in IEEE P1904.3, but
six bits are allocated to pktType field and reserved for future
use. It will be possible to utilize the unused value in the
subType field to deal with packets for the function split. In
the 5G mobile era, the Transport Block size and packet length
will have the potential to increase. In that case, mobile packets
will be fragmented over several RoE frames to avoid buffering
latency. The field “orderingInfo” currently discussed in IEEE
P1904.3 will be utilized to suppress latency while transporting
such fragmented packets in a proper sequence.
We assume that the sequence for transferring user data will
occupy most of the packet transferring sequence, and so we
describe it in the following sections.
MAC-PHY split
MAC Encode/ Mod/ MIMO FFT/iFFT RF
MFH Decode Demod
BBU RRH
RoE RoE RoE
SCAPI RoE frame
Fig. 4. SCAPI mapping on RoE in MAC-PHY split.
B. Downlink transport mechanism
A downlink transport mechanism that uses SCAPI is shown
in Fig. 5. The configuration information of PHY on the RRH
side is sent by using a DL CONFIG.request message from
the BBU side. Next, downlink MAC PDU is transferred by
a TX.request message. The DL CONFIG.request message
includes information such as scheduling for each channel.
In addition, the TX.request message includes downlink MAC
PDU itself in the form of TLV. The TX.request message will
be fragmented and mapped on multiple RoE frames as needed
if Transport Block in the message is long.
C. Uplink transport mechanism
The uplink transport mechanism that uses SCAPI is shown
in Fig. 6. First, uplink scheduling information for a given
UE such as DCI is sent to UE via a HI DCI0.request mes-
sage. Second, PHY configuration information for the sub-
frame that is controlled by the DCI is sent to the RRH
by using a UL CONFIG.request message. The uplink signal
from the UE instructed by the above mentioned scheduling
information is transferred to BBU from RRH by using an
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BBU RRH UE
DL_CONFIG.request
TX.request
MAC PDU
Fig. 5. Schematic diagram of downlink transmission with SCAPI.
RX ULSCH.indication message. MAC PDUs also are in-
cluded in the RX ULSCH.incdication message. Regarding
the RX ULSCH.indication message, the packet is fragmented
over multiple RoE frames as needed as with a downlink
TX.request message.
BBU RRH UE
HI_DCI0.request
Control information for uplink
UL_CONFIG.request
MAC PDU
RX_ULSCH.indication
Fig. 6. Schematic diagram of uplink transmission with SCAPI.
IV. N UMERICAL SIMULATION FOR REQUIRED MFH
CAPACITY
We estimated the MFH capacity required for our proposal
by numerical simulations where we employed SCAPI mapping
on RoE with the function split between the MAC-PHY layers
implemented.
A. Calculation conditions
It can be assumed that the MFH capacity with the MAC-
PHY split is almost the same as that for mobile backhaul
(MBH). Therefore, we followed the traffic model for MBH that
was previously proposed by NGMN [?]. We only considered
the downlink throughput in our calculations for the required
capacity assessment as it usually consumes much more than
the uplink does and is dominant in capacity design. The
required MFH capacity was calculated for the mean and the
peak values where a 99.999 percentile value was used for the
peak value. The parameters used for the simulation are shown
in Table 1.
We considered Weibull and log-normal distributions with
regard to the probability density function for the traffic distri-
bution. The mean value for the downlink was about 100 Mbit/s
per stream. It was assumed as follows:
• The mean throughput value was about 20 Mbit/s per
stream with a frequency bandwidth of 20 MHz and a
3
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TABLE I 4.5
S IMULATION PARAMETERS FOR REQUIRED MFH CAPACITY Mean
4
Item Value Peak (Weibull)
Frequency bandwidth 100 MHz )/s 3.5 Peak (Lognormal)
Modulation format 64QAM
itb 3
System bandwidth 600 Mbit/s
G(
thdi 2.5
Mean downlink throughput 100 Mbit/s
Overhead for control signal 20 % of user data traffic
Maximum stream number 16 wd 2
na
b
HF1.5
system bandwidth of 150 Mbit/s in accordance with a M1
previous report [?].
• The mean throughput was estimated to be about 80 Mbit/s 0.5
as the system bandwidth of 600 Mbit/s is four times 0
higher in this work. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
• The overhead for the control frames is assumed to be Number of streams
about 20% of the user data bandwidth, therefore, the
mean downlink throughput was about 100 Mbit/s per Fig. 7. Required downlink bandwidth dependence on the number of streams.
stream.

B. Results and discussion 20

Mean
The simulation results for the required MFH capacity per
)/s Peak (Weibull)
access point (AP), i.e. RRH, are shown in Fig. 7. It can itb 15 Peak (Lognormal)
be seen that the peak value was around 0.7 Gbit/s per AP, (Gh
and it was calculated to be about 4.0 Gbit/s even though tid
the number of the streams was increased to 16 thanks to the wd
na 10
statistical multiplexing effect. The calculations suggested that b
a cost-effective transport interface such as IEEE Std 802.3ae- HF
compliant 10GbE was applicable to MFH. M
Next, the required capacity per aggregated node, i.e. BBU, 5
was also calculated as shown in Fig. 8. It was revealed that
the peak traffic amounted to around 18 Gbit/s even though the
mean traffic value was around 13 Gbit/s per AP also owing to 0
the statistical multiplexing effect. These results indicated that 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
it was effective to directly configure the network between the Number of APs
aggregate base station and APs. They also showed that the
Fig. 8. Required uplink bandwidth dependence on number of APs.
aggregated node can be efficiently equipped with an interface
using commercially available, cost-effective devices such as
IEEE Std 802.3ba or 802.3bm-compliant 40GbE and 100GbE, ACKNOWLEDGMENT
and ITU-T G.709-compliant OTU3 and OTU4 without divid-
ing a large capacity into several lines with 10GbE using L2 This paper includes some of the results found in “The
switches. research and development project for realization of the fifth-
generation mobile communications system” commissioned by
V. C ONCLUSIONS The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
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