South Korea’s LG Uplus has contracted Chinese vendor Huawei in a deal which it claims will see it ‘take the lead’ in using wavelength-division multiplexing/optical transport network (WDM/OTN) technology for common public radio interface (CPRI) backhaul on the cellco’s LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) network. With a press release announcing the development saying the agreement marked a breakthrough in the field of LTE-A backhaul technology, the CPRI-over-WDM/OTN solution enables pooled baseband processing for distributed base stations, saving fibre resources and improving network reliability.
LG Uplus extensively adopts pooled baseband processing for distributed base stations on its LTE-A network in order to maximise bandwidth and spectrum efficiency, minimise interference caused by coverage overlap, and occupy less footprint. With it estimated that a centralised baseband processing pool in dense metropolitan areas should connect to over 100 remote radio units (RRUs), these are traditionally directly connected to the pool using fibre. While this requires considerable fibre resources, using WDM/OTN technology for LTE backhaul means that only a single fibre pair is required to backhaul multiple CPRIs from RRUs to the baseband processing pool.
Jack Wang, president of the Huawei transmission network product line, said of the deal: ‘With the development of mobile broadband, high-speed WDM transport is no longer confined to the backbone. It has been extended to the metro core, and will be applied to the metro edge in the LTE-A era. LG Uplus and Huawei’s innovation in LTE-A backhaul is a meaningful practice of WDM/OTN-to-the-edge.’