Want 5G? It’s going to take an IP anyhaul overhaul | EDN
Much of the ongoing discussion around 5G is focused on use cases: wireless broadband to the home, in-vehicle infotainment, immersive event experiences, truck platooning, remote health care, smart cities and smart factories to name a few.
Mobile networks and cloud packet core developers are working on the new mobile standards and technologies that will make this happen. Radio access network (RAN) technology is evolving from distributed to centralized to cloud architectures. Solutions are being developed to push content and some elements of core processing closer to users: Multi-access edge computing.
Operators will ultimately use a variety of architectures for 5G. Those new architectures are not going to work without an overhaul of what we call the anyhaul network: a mix of mobile transport technologies – including fiber, microwave, and GPON.Low latency is essential for centralized and cloud-optimized RAN architectures.
High-throughput IP routers with a variety of 1/10/100 GE, TDM, and SONET/SDH interfaces are required to provide high-throughput, secure, reliable routing for any-to-any connectivity over any network topology. Operators need 10 Gbps cell site and 100 Gbps network links, multi-terabit throughput capacity, and high port densities at every node. Carrier software defined networks (SDN) provide the functionality needed to provision end-to-end network services over multi-layer wide area networks.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
At Qorvo, Big Expectations for GaN
http://www.mwrf.com/semiconductors/qorvo-big-expectations-gan?NL=MWRF-001&Issue=MWRF-001_20170905_MWRF-001_747&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_2_b&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=12762&utm_medium=email&elq2=c22701f89c9a4c77ac4528c7961e4711
Qorvo systems engineer Bror Peterson discusses several topics in regard to 5G communications, such as gallium-nitride technology and more.
When talking about 5G, what role do you expect gallium-nitride (GaN) technology to have?
Peterson: The primary role for GaN, or more specifically, GaN-on-silicon-carbide (GaN-on-SiC), is high-efficiency final stage power amplifiers (PAs) for both traditional high-power macro, as well as emerging massive MIMO base station platforms. Widespread market adoption for GaN-on-SiC power amplifiers has been driven by the demand for wider-bandwidth multi-carrier and multi-band systems. Systems that once covered a single 20-MHz bandwidth now need 10x the power and 20x bandwidth to handle various intraband and interband carrier aggregation combinations.
It is generally accepted that GaN-on-SiC Doherty PAs achieve higher power-added efficiency (PAE) at higher frequencies and over larger bandwidth compared to incumbent LDMOS technology. At a unit-cell level, GaN devices are fundamentally more efficient and inherently have higher output impedance, along with lower parasitic capacitance. This allows easier wideband matching and scaling to very large output powers. In addition, GaN-on-SiC is more reliable at high channel temperatures. The bottom line is that GaN is a fundamentally better semiconductor (high breakdown voltage and saturation velocity) that allows new system level trades to improve size, weight, power, and cost.
As we move toward 5G, significantly wider component carrier bandwidths (up to 200 MHz) and new frequency bands covering 3.3 to 4.9 GHz and beyond are being standardized, requiring the use of GaN. In addition to the sub-6-GHz enhancements, 5G will also introduce new millimeter-wave bands between 24-30 and 37-43 GHz. These millimeter-wave hybrid beamformed base stations will need very compact, fully-integrated front-end-modules. GaN’s high power density and low noise figure is particularly well suited for this application and will be key to achieving the effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) and antenna gain to noise temperature (G/T) needed to close the link to mobile user equipment.
For massive MIMO platforms with up to 128 transmit and receive paths, a much higher level of integration is needed. Initially, the driver plus fully matched Doherty PA will be integrated into a single package.
On the receive side, dual-channel switch low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) with multiple stages of variable gain are already mainstream. Over time, a single fully-integrated 2T2R or 4T4R module will directly interface to the antenna and transceiver, and may include the isolators and filters.
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-waves/4458755/Test-is-a-key-challenge-for-5G?utm_content=buffer9267c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Test is a key challenge for 5G
James Kimery -August 25, 2017
The most recent 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) Plenary meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida confirmed that the industry continues to make excellent progress for meeting the goal of having the 5G New Radio (5G NR) physical layer defined by December 2017. But there is still a long road ahead.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G Startup Aims to Beat Intel, Q’comm
Movandi shows efficient mm-wave module
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332244&
A startup launched by a brother-and-sister team from Broadcom will show at MWC Americas a millimeter-wave module for 5G networks. Co-chief executive Maryam Rofougaran talked about the technology and its markets as well as the state of women in technology and techno-politics around her birth country of Iran.
Movandi’s BeamX module is an RF front-end including everything from an antenna array to a baseband interface. It targets 28 and 39 GHz 5G systems including base stations and receivers as well as use in indoor gigabit, fixed-wireless access and satellite networks.
The startup aims to deliver a 4-5 dB better link budget than competing products while consuming 30 percent less transmit power. That could translate to products that double range to 400 meters or line-of-sight data rates of 4-5 Gbits/second.
Movandi will sample 8- and 16-antenna modules for 28 GHz nets before the end of the year and a 39 GHz version early next year.
The products target customer-premises gear expected to use 16-32 antennas and base stations that may use up to 256 antennas. The modules link to basebands via IQ analog, digital SDI control and a third unnamed interface.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G Spans Last Mile to Handset
Ericsson engineer reviews top challenges
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332240
5G cellular will start with fixed-wireless services, lead to big changes in smartphones and ultimately rack up some staggering numbers, according to a keynote from a senior Ericsson engineer.
Verizon and AT&T have already announced plans to use 5G at 28 and 39 GHz as a last-mile access technology starting late next year. “It will be easier to plop a pole in a neighborhood than connect homes via fiber,” said Dave Allen, a distinguished engineer at Ericsson speaking at Hot Interconnects last week.
Thanks in part to such services, Ericsson expects by 2027 more traffic will run over wireless than wired nets. The initial 5G fixed-wireless services will act as neighborhood extensions of carriers’ core LTE networks.
The collaborative 4G/5G roll out is different from the past, in part because pure 5G requires a fair amount of heavy lifting.
For example, millimeter wave transmitters and receivers will need to use massive MIMO antennas with beam forming on both sides. The techniques compensate for about 40 dB signal loss leaping from traditional 3 to 5G 39 GHz radios.
At those frequencies, interference can come from “radio passing through my body, flocks of birds and trucks driving by…there’s 10 million times higher loss than on wired nets,” Allen said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
In DARPA’s Colosseum, the Combatants are RF Signals
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1332233&
DARPA’s testbed replicates RF-spectrum chaos, taking test and algorithm evaluation beyond basic link testing.
You’ve read the history books and seen some of the many movies about the famed Roman Colosseum (the 2000 film “Gladiator” with Russell Crowe is just one of them): In that fabled amphitheater, completed around the year 70 CE, the combatants included gladiators, slaves, prisoners, and animals.
Times have changed, and among the combatants in the world we now inhabit are the many RF signals fighting each other for slices of the electromagnetic spectrum. Testing how a product works in this RF-laden environment is a major challenge to which almost all design, test, and evaluation engineers can attest. There are actually two kinds of RF tests. The first assesses if the device meets basic, point-to-point, and network requirements, as well as regulatory EMI mandates for unwanted emissions. Those are the relatively easy tests.
That’s where DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — is playing a role. To address this real-world RF test environment, their Colosseum installation is a next-generation emulator of RF sources, and lots of them. It is housed in a modest 20 × 30-ft. (6 × 9-m) server room at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. Engineers at APL constructed it with 128 two-antenna, software-defined radio (SDR) units built by National Instruments. T
The DARPA press release gives some additional facts: “By the numbers, the Colosseum testbed is a 256-by-256-channel RF channel emulator, which means it can calculate and simulate in real time more than 65,000 channel interactions among 256 wireless devices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 5 best 5G use cases
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-waves/4458756/The-5-best-5G-use-cases
There are five use cases that wireless carriers around the world are prioritizing in combination with their 5G network rebuilds, according to Arthur D. Little (ADL), which says it is providing consulting services to several of those companies.
Use cases are integral elements in the development of 5G technology and the attendant 5G standards development process. Different use cases will have different network requirements – sometimes vastly different, so business plans and network upgrades must progress hand-in-hand. The number of possible use cases depends on who’s doing the counting and what they decide to count, but it ranges from as few as three very general categories to a dozen or more specific applications.
The ITU has developed a use case diagram; it’s a triangular map that assigns an application category to each corner (enhanced mobile, massive machine type communications, ultrareliable and low-latency applications) and then graphs specific applications (voice, smart cities, augmented reality, etc.) within the triangle based on the extent to which they share the characteristics of each category. There are multiple versions of the map, some more complex, some less so; the one reproduced here is from an ITU presentation from September 2016.
ADL has identified five practical use cases, some more aimed at establishing market leadership, others more evolutionary and representing placing a stake in the ground. They are, along with key proponents of each:
Gigabit broadband to the home (Verizon)
Next generation mobile user experience (T-Mobile)
Future corporate networks (Vodafone)
Digital industrial ecosystems (Korea Telecom)
Infrastructure as a service
ADL sees 5G as complementary to fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) and cable-based broadband (aka DOCSIS) as a means to deliver streams rated at hundreds of megabits per second to gigabits per second. These faster rates are needed to deliver television at resolutions beyond 4K (6K, 8K, and possibly beyond), as well as both virtual and augmented reality.
5G could be used to simply provide better service, and charging people for higher tiers of service.
Future corporate applications
ADL says several corporations are set to launch services on 5G networks, “leapfrogging 4G to take advantage of the inherent top 3 features of 5G namely: slicing, security and milli-second latency.” Slicing is the process of logically isolating network elements that otherwise would be used as shared resources.
Digital industrial ecosystems
Corporate applications imply bespoke network configurations for specific customers. Digital industrial ecosystems imply network configurations that every participant in a particular industry can benefit from.
Next-gen infrastructure as a service
This approach, ADL explains, is for service providers that lack the resources to invest in nationwide 5G coverage, unless they enter agreements with development partners. The partners could be financing partners, local partners (municipalities or states), a rollout partner (construction companies for example), or an operating partner (a peer or even an erstwhile rival)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Innovation Leads to Results in Millimeter-Wave Network Analysis
These broadband network analyzer solutions have been unleashed to meet the growing need for millimeter-wave testing.
http://www.mwrf.com/test-measurement/innovation-leads-results-millimeter-wave-network-analysis?NL=MWRF-001&Issue=MWRF-001_20170822_MWRF-001_892&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_2_b&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=12586&utm_medium=email&elq2=46de0742b87d49c09c361c7daf367592
The characterization and modeling of broadband devices presents many challenges, and these become more difficult as new-generation designs move up to millimeter-wave frequencies. When assessing a vector network analyzer (VNA), which is the most commonly used tool, the crucial attributes beyond single-sweep frequency range include stability and uncertainty across the entire measurement band.
A new solution is a broadband millimeter-wave network analyzer, which provides exceptional measurement performance with stability within 0.015 dB and 0.15° over a 24-hour period. Keysight Technologies’ N5290A and N5291A broadband millimeter-wave network analyzers cover a frequency range of 900 Hz to 120 GHz (Fig. 1). They leverage the company’s capabilities in terms of metrology and calibration, providing traceable, metrology-grade results across the full frequency range.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G Startup Aims to Beat Intel, Q’comm
Movandi shows efficient mm-wave module
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332244&
A startup launched by a brother-and-sister team from Broadcom will show at MWC Americas a millimeter-wave module for 5G networks. Co-chief executive Maryam Rofougaran talked about the technology and its markets as well as the state of women in technology and techno-politics around her birth country of Iran.
Movandi’s BeamX module is an RF front-end including everything from an antenna array to a baseband interface. It targets 28 and 39 GHz 5G systems including base stations and receivers as well as use in indoor gigabit, fixed-wireless access and satellite networks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G book gets into the technology details
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4458782/5G-book-gets-into-the-technology-details
5G is huge, and I’m not talking about the marketing hype that will come in the next few years. Instead, I’m referring to the technological challenge of increasing data rates, reducing latency, and increasing the number of users—all of which must occur with better use of spectrum and with lower energy consumption. From a consumer perspective, we also want it all at no additional cost.
Toward 5G: Applications, Requirements & Candidate Technologies, edited by Rath Vannithamby and Shilpa Talwar. ISBN: 978-1-118-97983-9, John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Price: $125. http://www.wiley.com/go/vannithamby/towards5g.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ZTE kickstarts NSA 5G NR tests: What is it and why should we care?
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-standards-watch/4458688/ZTE-kickstarts-NSA-5G-NR-tests–What-is-it-and-why-should-we-care-
5G New Radio (5G-NR) was a hot topic for discussion at Mobile World Congress in February; it got formal recognition as RP-170741 by the 3GPP at its meeting in Dubrovnik in March; and on July 10, it got real, with ZTE and China Unicom collaborating on tests in the 3.5-GHz band.
To understand what this means, let’s unpack all that, starting with a quick description of 5G NR and an introduction to NSA 5G NR, the version that got approved at Dubrovnik.
5G NR derived from work led by Qualcomm to develop a unified air interface and network to address the need for enhanced mobile broadband with gigabit-per-second speeds; mission-critical automotive, medical and industrial services; and the “massive” Internet of things (IoT) now unfolding
The new radio interface was designed to address these applications, while also incorporating a flexible approach to spectrum usage and overall lower latency and cost per bit.
Building upon LTE, the interface and modulation scheme of choice for 5G NR is an optimized version of multiple-access OFDM with dynamic, low-latency TDD and FDD, making it both backward compatible with current infrastructure, and forward compatible with where LTE is headed. It also emphasizes the use of massive MIMO, operation both below and above 6 GHz, beamforming, and low-density parity check (LDPC).
Tomi Engdahl says:
3GPP Burns Midnight Oil for 5G
Long hours, streamlined features to finish draft
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332248
The race is on to deliver some form of 5G as soon as possible.
An Intel executive painted a picture of engineers pushing the pedal to the metal to complete an early version of the 5G New Radio (NR) standard by the end of the year. She promised that Intel will have a test system based on its x86 processors and FPGAs as soon as the spec is finished.
The 3GPP group defining the 5G NR has set a priority of finishing a spec for a non-standalone version by the end of the year. It will extend existing LTE core networks with a 5G NR front end for services such as fixed-wireless access.
After that work is finished, the radio-access group will turn its attention to drafting a standalone 5G NR spec by September 2018.
“Right now, NR non-standalone is going fine with lots of motivation, come hell or high water, to declare a standard by the end of December,” said Asha Keddy, an Intel vice president and general manager of its next-generation and standards group. “The teams don’t even break until 10 p.m. on many days, and even then, sometimes they have sessions after dinner.”
To lighten the load, a plenary meeting of the 3GPP radio-access group next week is expected to streamline the proposed feature set for non-standalone NR. While a baseline of features such as channel coding and subcarrier spacing have been set, some features are behind schedule for being defined, such as MIMO beam management, said Keddy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G Startup Aims to Beat Intel, Q’comm
Movandi shows efficient mm-wave module
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332244&
A startup launched by a brother-and-sister team from Broadcom will show at MWC Americas a millimeter-wave module for 5G networks. Co-chief executive Maryam Rofougaran talked about the technology and its markets as well as the state of women in technology and techno-politics around her birth country of Iran.
The startup aims to deliver a 4-5 dB better link budget than competing products while consuming 30 percent less transmit power. That could translate to products that double range to 400 meters or line-of-sight data rates of 4-5 Gbits/second.
Movandi will sample 8- and 16-antenna modules for 28 GHz nets before the end of the year and a 39 GHz version early next year. They will be based on RF ICs taped out about three weeks ago. Its first prototype was a 64-antenna array based on chips taped out at the end of last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5G book gets into the technology details
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4458782/5G-book-gets-into-the-technology-details
Toward 5G: Applications, Requirements & Candidate Technologies, edited by Rath Vannithamby and Shilpa Talwar. ISBN: 978-1-118-97983-9, John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Price: $125. http://www.wiley.com/go/vannithamby/towards5g.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LTE-Advanced Pro: The bridge to 5G
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4458335/LTE-Advanced-Pro–The-bridge-to-5G
Cellular technology has advanced from analog to 4G LTE-Advanced Pro, with 5G in development.
To find out more about LTE-Advanced Pro, I spoke with Ixia’s Gabriel Chiriacescu. “We see cellular IoT devices and the growing demand for greater bandwidth from mobile users as driving 5G. LTE-Advanced Pro is a bridge from LTE-Advanced to 5G.” he said. “The IoT market can’t wait for 5G.”
Ixia’s LTE XAir2 emulates thousands of calls and is designed to test ICs, network equipment, and entire networks. A look at what it does gives you a good idea of LTE_Advanced Pro’s capabilities.
LTE-Advanced Carrier Aggregation (2CA through 4CA): Carrier aggregation finally gets its place in the sun. The idea behind it is to use two-to-five carriers, each 20-MHz wide, to form either bandwidth block of up to 100 MHz
Tomi Engdahl says:
3GPP Burns Midnight Oil for 5G
Long hours, streamlined features to finish draft
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332248
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rogers Lays Foundations for Millimeter-Wave Circuits
Materials specialist will display circuit materials that support high-speed digital and millimeter-wave analog circuits for emerging 5G equipment applications.
http://www.mwrf.com/materials/rogers-lays-foundations-millimeter-wave-circuits?NL=MWRF-003&Issue=MWRF-003_20170911_MWRF-003_648&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_2_b&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=12866&utm_medium=email&elq2=02b55fe2e451451fa1064420a7a85b36
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fast ADC Facilitates Direct RF Sampling at Higher Frequencies
http://www.electronicdesign.com/analog/fast-adc-facilitates-direct-rf-sampling-higher-frequencies?NL=ED-003&Issue=ED-003_20170911_ED-003_730&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_1_b&utm_rid=CPG05000002750211&utm_campaign=12874&utm_medium=email&elq2=68c69c0a95b14e789e404e1a65f22128
Sponsored by: Texas Instruments. Simple in nature, the new RF-sampling receiver architecture yields major benefits at VHF, UHF, and microwave levels.
Benefits of RF Sampling
The simpler receiver signal chain offers some significant benefits. Fewer stages generally mean lower cost and better noise figure. Higher RF gain may be needed to offset the gain of the mixer and any IF amplifier, but the overall noise figure will be improved. An image problem does not exist.
The local-oscillator feedthrough and spur issues are also vanquished. It eliminates a local oscillator, but is essentially replaced by the ADC sampling clock. This architecture typically offers greater flexibility for frequency planning in design, a modern necessity because of the wide range of potential interference sources and targets.
A super-fast ADC potentially opens up a lot of application doors, particularly in RF communications. Some examples are software-defined radios (SDRs) of all types, satellite communications, radar, communications test equipment, forthcoming 5G radios, and digital sampling oscilloscopes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
At millimeter-wave frequencies, the antenna array element
spacing is extremely small (3.75 mm at 39 GHz). It will be
necessary to integrate at least the PA, TR Switch, and LNA into
a single module. Further integration with a core-beamformer
RFIC is expected, but may be delayed due to export compli
-
ance considerations that limit output power when integrated
with phase and amplitude controls.
Tomi Engdahl says:
With 5G technology, the time is now
https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/5g-waves/4458843/With-5G-technology–the-time-is-now-
Just under half of the wireless network operators in the world plan to have 5G technology deployed within the next 12 months, if they don’t already. The vast majority of carriers expect to have begun deploying 5G within 24 months.
AT&T and Verizon have been monopolizing the 5G spotlight, perhaps creating an impression that few other service providers are doing much with 5G. But the results of a survey conducted on behalf of Ixia demonstrate that there is an enormous cast of carriers in the wings preparing to take the stage, and soon. The survey asked service providers about their plans for evaluating 5G technology, and also their plans for deploying 5G technology.
The results suggest that the evolution toward 5G is moving faster than many expected, according to Ixia vice president of mobility and virtualization products Kalyan Sundhar. He told EDN, “The thing that interested us quite a bit was that two-thirds of them [network operators] will be in some state of evaluation in next 12 months … A lot of industry experts said it will be deployed later. Well, deployment in a widespread way may not come for a few years, but there’s a lot of action that will be driven by vendors and service providers over the course of the next 12 months.”
Two-thirds plan to evaluate 5G in the next year, and another 26 percent plan to start sometime in the subsequent 12 months. That leaves only 7 percent of wireless network operators uninterested in actively investigating the technology within the next two years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Clock circuit for 5G base stations
Base station manufacturers are already designing iron that reaches the fast speed and latency requirements of the 5G networks. Future base stations also need new components. Silicon Labs’ new clock circuit solves one part of the tedious 5G equation.
The SiLabs Si5381 / 82/86 clock circuit is the first chip on the market that generates a clock signal for both the LTE / 5G base station and the Ethernet interface. It is specially designed for new 5G base stations using eCPRI.
The recently announced eCPRI specification supports the so-called ” the connection of the distributed base stations – where the antenna and calculation section elements are connected to one of the Ethernet bays. Until now, such a solution would have required the use of several clock circuits. The SiLabs novelty synchronizes both parts with a new base station.
In addition, the circuits have a voltage controlled VCXO crystal oscillator. A more integrated solution enables smaller device implementations, which is an important requirement for 5G networks consisting of smaller cells.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6901&via=n&datum=2017-09-27_15:45:03&mottagare=31202
Tomi Engdahl says:
NXP Seeks ‘Edge’ vs. Intel, Cavium
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332402&
TOKYO — As the lines begin to blur between cloud and edge computing, NXP Semiconductors is racing to offer the highest performance SoC of the company’s Layerscape family.
The new chip, LX2160A, can offload heavy-duty computing done at data centers in the cloud, enabling the middle of the network — typically, service operators — to execute network virtualization and run high-performance network applications on network equipment such as base stations.
Toby Foster, senior product manager for NXP, told us that his team developed the new high-performance chip with three goals in mind. They sought first to enable new types of virtualization in the network, second to achieve new heights of integration and performance at low power featuring next-generation I/Os, and third, to double the scale of virtual network functions and crypto, compared to NXP’s previous Layerscape SoC (LS2088A), while maintaining low power consumption.
Specifically, the LX2160A features 16 high-performance ARM Cortex-A72 cores running at over 2 GHz at 20- to 30-watt. It supports both the 100 Gbit/s Ethernet and PCIe Gen4 interconnect standards.
Why edge computing?
The industry, including NXP, tends to view edge processing as the driver for the next phase of networking, computing and IoT infrastructure growth.
By moving workloads from the cloud to the edge, operators will suffer less latency while gaining resiliency and bandwidth reliability, explained Foster.
Bob Wheeler, principal analyst responsible for networking at the Linley Group, told us, “In some cases, such as content delivery networks, the transition from the cloud to the edge is already happening.” He predicted, “Mobile edge computing will primarily happen in conjunction with 5G rollouts starting in 2019.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New optical interface standard aims at 5G
https://www.edn.com/design/test-and-measurement/4458908/New-optical-interface-standard-aims-at-5G?utm_content=buffer4c15a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
By now, you may have seen the announcement from the AXIe Consortium, the VITA trade organization, and six companies endorsing a new standard called the Optical Data Interface (ODI).
ODI is a new high-speed interface for instrumentation and embedded systems. It breaks speed and distance barriers by relying on optical communication between devices, over a standard pluggable optical fiber. With speeds up to 20 GBytes/s from a single optical port, and speeds up to 80 GBytes/s through port aggregation, ODI is designed to address challenging applications in 5G communications, mil/aero systems, high-speed data acquisition, and communication research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ciena introduces 5G network capabilities enabling operators to scale current 4G networks
February 15, 2018
http://www.lightwaveonline.com/articles/2018/02/ciena-introduces-5g-network-capabilities-enabling-operators-to-scale-current-4g-networks.html?cmpid=enl_lightwave_lightwave_enabling_technologies_2018-02-15&pwhid=6b9badc08db25d04d04ee00b499089ffc280910702f8ef99951bdbdad3175f54dcae8b7ad9fa2c1f5697ffa19d05535df56b8dc1e6f75b7b6f6f8c7461ce0b24&eid=289644432&bid=2006078
Ciena (NYSE: CIEN) says it has introduced 5G network capabilities to several existing platforms that will enable operators to scale their current 4G networks. The company says its 5G network technology leverages an open, scalable design that enables products that both address stringent 4G and 5G network performance requirements and prepare for evolving demand characteristics.
According to Ciena, 4G and 5G networks will exist side-by-side on the same wireline network infrastructure, between cell sites, as well as to and from data centers, where accessed content is hosted. Reliability, latency, throughput, and security requirements will demand more than a basic network upgrade or expansion as mobile broadband and IoT traffic develops on these networks.