Wireless access system
10763965 ยท 2020-09-01
Assignee
Inventors
Cpc classification
H04B7/024
ELECTRICITY
H04B10/25753
ELECTRICITY
International classification
H04B7/024
ELECTRICITY
H04L12/28
ELECTRICITY
Abstract
A wireless access system includes a baseband processing unit pool, an optical network unit and a remote radio head. The BBU pool may be connected to one or more ONUs, each of the ONUs may be connected to one or more RRHs, and the connection between each of the ONUs and the one or more RRHs may be implemented using a twisted pair. Embodiments can provide access, convergence and transport with a very large capacity from indoor antenna units to a centralized BBU as well as an easy installation, and thus they are cost economical for a large scale deployment of indoor wireless access. Furthermore, advanced wireless technologies, such as large scale MIMO and CoMP, can be supported.
Claims
1. A wireless access system, comprising: a baseband processing unit (BBU) pool, an optical network unit (ONU), and a set of remote radio heads, the BBU pool being connected to one or more ONUs, each of the ONUs being connected to at least two remote radio heads of the set of remote radio heads, a connection between each of the ONUs and each of the at least two remote radio heads being implemented using a twisted pair, wherein the BBU pool compensates for crosstalk in transmission via the twisted pair.
2. The wireless access system according to claim 1, wherein the connection between each of the ONUs and each of the set of remote radio heads is implemented using a RJ-45 port.
3. The wireless access system according to claim 1, wherein the connection between the BBU pool and the one or more ONUs is implemented using optical fiber and passive optical network (PON) architecture.
4. The wireless access system according to claim 1, wherein each of the set of remote radio heads enables coordinated transmission of one or more antennas.
5. The wireless access system according to claim 4, wherein the coordinated transmission includes multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission.
6. The wireless access system according to claim 5, wherein the BBU pool compensates for crosstalk in transmission via the twisted pair and interference in the MIMO transmission simultaneously.
7. The wireless access system according to claim 4, wherein the coordinated transmission includes coordinated multiple-point (CoMP) transmission.
8. The wireless access system according to claim 1, wherein each of the at least two remote radio heads separately receive signals from respective ones of a plurality of antennas, separately perform the following: process the received signals, and feed the processed signals to respective ones of twisted pairs that correspond to the plurality of antennas to transport the signals to the connected ONUs in parallel.
9. The wireless access system according to claim 1, wherein each of the remote radio heads and the ONU are located inside a building and the twisted pair includes a local area network (LAN) cable and/or a phone line cable.
Description
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
(1) The above and other objectives, features and advantages of embodiments of the present disclosure will become more apparent in conjunction with the accompanying drawings with reference to the following detailed depiction, and several embodiments of the present disclosure are illustrated here in an example, but non-limitative, manner, in the accompanying drawings, wherein:
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
DETAILED DESCRIPTION
(11) Principles and spirits of the present disclosure will now be described with reference to several example embodiments illustrated in the drawings. It should be appreciated that depiction of these embodiments is only to enable those skilled in the art to better understand and further implement the present disclosure, not intended for limiting the scope of the present disclosure in any manner.
(12) As described in the previous context, for current indoor DAS system, coaxial cables are in wide use as the last 100 meter fixed tunnel connecting the numerous antenna units to the common baseband processing unit (BBU) pool. Drawbacks in two aspects have been noticed restricting the development of indoor DAS.
(13) Firstly, using coaxial cable is regarded as cost-inefficient since the price of coaxial cable itself is high and the number to be required in future indoor wireless deployment scenarios will be very large. Secondly, data streams fed to/from all the antennas are of broadcasting feature due to the passive cloning mechanism in the fixed cable distribution system. Thus, this restricts the capacity through air interfaces and also disables advanced applications like MIMO and CoMP. Hence, the user experience and the development of indoor wireless business are severely restricted.
(14) Due to the requirement on MIMO-compatibility and compatibility of other advanced wireless technologies and scattering distribution feature of the in-building antenna system, embodiments of the present disclosure propose a wireless access and transport solution over fixed network architectures.
(15)
(16) As further shown in
(17) A converged indoor small cell system and outdoor macro cell access can also be supported by the wireless access system 100 proposed in the embodiments of the present disclosure, where an ONU of the macro cell can also been included in the same PON architecture. Hence, as shown in
(18) As shown in
(19)
(20) According to some embodiments of the present disclosure, UE 210 can communicate with the RRH 220 via the wireless link 260. In further embodiments, RRH 220 can implement coordinated transmission of one or more antennas. For example,
(21) In some embodiments of the present disclosure, the RRH 220 can convert signals received from antennas into an intermediate frequency via a same number of mixers 221-224 with that of the antennas and may transport them to the ONU 230 over the twisted pair 270. In some embodiments, the twisted pair 270 may include LAN cables and/or phone line cables. In specific scenarios, the twisted pair 270 may have a range of a magnitude order of 100 meters and may contain crosstalk.
(22) According to some embodiments of the present disclosure, the ONU 230 can modulate the received signals onto a laser generated by a laser 231 and transport it to the OLT 240 through the PON including the optical fiber 280. In specific scenarios, the optical fiber 280 in the PON may have a range of a magnitude order of 20 km. The OLT 240 can process the signals received from the optical fiber 280 and transport them to the BBU 250.
(23) Therefore, the obtained signals in the BBU 250 from the UE 210 have gone through not only the wireless link 260 but also the twisted pair 270. In some embodiments, the BBU 250 can compensate for crosstalk during transmission over the twisted pair 270. Further, in the embodiment of the wireless link 260 using wireless MIMO, the BBU 250 may compensate for interference in the MIMO transmission and the crosstalk in the transmission over the twisted pair simultaneously. In some embodiments, the BBU 250 may include a compensating unit 251 which can decode and restore data in the BBU 250 with a unified MIMO/crosstalk eliminating algorithm.
(24) Moreover, it is noteworthy that since in the embodiments of the present disclosure data transported over the twisted pair 270 and the optical fiber 280 are both in an analog format, the signal transmission bandwidth is greatly reduced compared to a digital IQ quantization approach, so that the transport capacity can satisfy the requirement of the technical solution according to the embodiments of the present disclosure. Therefore, using the technical solution provided by the embodiments of the present disclosure for indoor wireless access and transport, a large capacity can be realized on the one hand, and compatibility to MIMO, CoMP and other advanced wireless technologies can be achieved on the other hand in terms of feasibility and cost efficiency.
(25)
(26) During uplink transport, a UE 310 can communicate with the RRH module 320 via the wireless link 360. In some embodiments, the wireless link 360 can be a wireless MIMO channel. The RRH module 320 can transport signals via the twisted pairs 370 to the ONU module 330. In some embodiments, the twisted pairs 370 can be LAN cables and/or phone line cables. In some embodiments, each ONU module 330 can be connected with one or more RRHs 320 via a RJ-45 port. ONU module 330 can transport signals via optical the optical fiber 380 and a PON architecture to the OLT module 340. In specific scenarios, the length of the optical fiber 380 can be as long as tens of kilometers or more. Finally, the OLT module 340 can transport signals to the BBU unit 350 for centralized baseband processing, thus completing the uplink transporting process. Downlink transporting process can be an inverse process of the uplink transporting process, and thus omitted here.
(27) As further shown in
(28) In some embodiments, the ONU module 330 may include analog-to-digital converting (ADC) units 3311-3314. Though
(29) During signal transporting, the ONU module 330 can receive signals from the connected RRH module 320 via the twisted pairs 370, process the received signals, and transport the processed signals to the connected BBU module 350 via the optical fiber 380 and PON architecture. In some embodiments, the processing of the received signals by the ONU module 330 may include one or more of the following: analog-to-digital conversion, synchronization and alignment, parallel-to-serial conversion, time division multiplexing, digital-to-analog conversion, and electrical-to-optical conversion.
(30) In some embodiments, the OLT module 340 may include optical-to-electrical converting O/E unit 341, analog-digital converting A/D unit 342, and synchronizing and time division multiplexing unit 343. The BBU module 304 may include a compensating unit 351 and a decoding unit 352. In some embodiments, the OLT module 340 may receive signals from one or more ONU modules 330 via an optical fiber 380, process the received signals, and transport the processed signals to the BBU module 350. In some embodiments, the processing of the received signals by the OLT module 340 may include at least one of the following: optical-to-electrical conversion, analog-to-digital conversion and time division multiplexing.
(31) Those skilled in the art can understand that
(32)
(33) As further illustrated in
(34) Specifically, in operation, wireless signals received by the RRH 400 from each antenna 401-404 are firstly received by the antenna port 410, and amplified and down converted by the down converting unit 420. The down converted signals can be in a bandwidth from DC to, for instance, 20 MHz. Finally, each down converted output signal can be linked to a twisted pair in e.g. Cat 5a/6a lines.
(35) As shown in
(36)
(37) In some embodiments, the RRH 400 and the RRH 500 can implement coordinated transmission of one or more antennas 401-404 and antennas 501-5016. In some embodiments, the coordinated transmission may include MIMO transmission or CoMP transmission.
(38) In contrast,
(39) In the conventional RRH 600, the CPRI encapsulation and SFP unit 660 are mainly used to enable output signals fit for transport via an optical fiber. In contrast, since embodiments of the present disclosure can adopt a twisted pair to transport output signals of the RRH. Thus, compared with the conventional RRH 600, the RHH 400 and the RHH 500 according to the embodiments of the present disclosure can remove the ADC units 641-644 and the CPRI encapsulation and SFP unit 660, i.e. a unit used to implement an electrical-to-optical conversion. Moreover, the optical interface (such as SFP) adapted to transport via an optical fiber can be changed to a RJ-45 port fit for transmission via a twisted pair.
(40)
(41) As further illustrated in
(42) In the specific embodiment depicted in
(43) It is noteworthy that the synchronizing and aligning unit 722 of the ONU 700 only functions to correct the propagation time difference caused among four ADC 721 channels. Any delay or time difference caused in transport via wireless links or twisted pairs is not processed in the synchronizing and aligning unit 722. It is noteworthy that the four signal inputs from twisted pair ports have analog characteristics and so do the output signals on the optical fiber.
(44)
(45) As further shown in
(46) In some embodiments, an incoming signal entering the OLT 800 may have gone through the optical fiber for, for instance, 20 km. An optical-to-electrical conversion may be firstly performed on the incoming signal in the OLT 800, and then an analog serial data stream may be quantized by A/D 822 whose sample bandwidth and sampling rate should match the overall capacity carried on the optical fiber. s times denoted in
(47) Now, referring back to
(48) With the processing of previous stages of the RRH, the ONU and the OLT, now the signals entering the BBU 350 are almost the same as that used for an input of a conventional BBU for an uplink. The difference only lies in that signals of each channel are not only transported via an wireless MIMO channel but also experience inter-channel crosstalk of a twisted pair, and thus a channelization similar to MIMO may also be used. In a specific embodiment, a MIMO detector for wireless decoding in the BBU 350 can compensate for wireless MIMO channels and crosstalk effect of twisted pairs simultaneously.
(49)
(50)
(51) Next, the two received signals captured in the real time oscilloscope are converted from parallel to serial, with one data stream aligned in front of the other. In other words, a time domain multiplexing scheme is employed. The newly generated stream may be uploaded into the AWG again. This time the AWG may operate at a 5G sampling rate, which is 250 times as large as 20 MHz, indicating that the two signals occupy a 1/125 time slot of the overall broadband signal on the optical fiber link. A 20 km standard single mode optical fiber may be used as a long reach media between an ONU and a BBU. The real time oscilloscope may again be used to capture the broadband signal after optical fiber transmission and the optical/electrical conversion. The serial data stream may firstly be split into two parallel data streams and may be decoded according to unified channelization information learned from training data. The recovered constellations are shown in
(52) As the specific example in
(53) In the embodiments of the present disclosure, a massive-capacity transport solution is proposed for indoor wireless access over a hybrid MIMO wireless channel and fixed network architecture consisting of a crosstalk rich unshielded twisted pair and a long reach optical fiber. The similarity between crosstalk rich channelization of the twisted pair and interference rich channelization of MIMO over wireless interface has been fully utilized. The overall crosstalk mitigation and pre-coding algorithms are carried out in post BBU pool after the hybrid transport with sustaining DSP complexity of conventional BBU. Economical Cat 5a/6a lines are fully utilized for the last 100 meter access in building to significantly reduce the indoor wireless fronthaul installation and deployment cost. MIMO application is also compatible in this approach, comparing to conventional indoor DAS solutions. By converging and multiplexing the data streams in an ONU and then transporting overall broadband signals over optical fiber from the ONU to the BBU, large fronthaul capacity can be realized, showing great capacity superiority over current CPRI protocol. Therefore, the technical solution according to the embodiments of the present disclosure is very promising for next generation wireless access (especially for indoor application and deployment).
(54) In the description of the embodiments of the present disclosure, the terms used herein, such as comprising and including, should be interpreted as inclusive terms, namely, comprising/including but not limited to. The term based on means at least partly based on. The term one embodiment or the embodiment should be interpreted as at least one embodiment.
(55) It should be noted that embodiments of the present disclosure can be implemented with software, hardware or the combination thereof. The hardware part can be implemented by a special logic; the software part can be stored in a memory and executed by a proper instruction execution system such as a microprocessor or a design-specific hardware. The normally skilled in the art may understand that the above device and method may be implemented with a computer-executable instruction and/or in a processor controlled code, for example, such code is provided on a bearer medium such as a programmable memory or a data bearer such as an optical or electronic signal bearer.
(56) Beside, although operations of the present methods are described in a particular order in the drawings, it does not require or imply that these operations must be performed according to this particular sequence, or a desired outcome can only be achieved by performing all shown operations. On the contrary, the execution order for the steps as described in the flowcharts may be varied. Additionally or alternatively, some steps may be omitted, a plurality of steps may be merged into one step, or a step may be divided into a plurality of steps for execution. It should also be noted that the features and functions of the above described two or more units may be embodied in one means. In turn, the features and functions of the above described one means may be further embodied in more units.
(57) Although the present disclosure has been described with reference to a plurality of embodiments, it should be understood that the present disclosure is not limited to the disclosed embodiments. The present disclosure intends to cover various modifications and equivalent arrangements included in the spirit and scope of the appended claims.