Flexible Infrastructure for the Development and Integration of Access/Fronthauling Solutions in Future Wireless Systems

The deployment of the 5G technology(ies) is planned to start by 2020, and these future systems will comprise multiple heterogeneous technologies and services ranging from the personal cellular, wireless local area networks (WLAN) up to the Internet of Things (IoT). The inherent complexity and heterogeneity in technology conjugated with the random nature of both the wireless channel, access and services will make the system evaluation of 5G a very difficult task calling for flexible testbeds where the randomness of the radio environment and mobility can be realistically emulated. In this paper we report the architecture of a flexible and reconfigurable solution currently under deployment in the campus of University of Aveiro, Portugal. The architecture essentially fits the concept of a local cloud-RAN, where remote radio heads (RRH) are deployed within the campus and linked through a front-haul to a central unit located in a laboratory where most of the processing ranging from the PHY layer up to the resource management is handled. The proposed architectures privilege the existence of a soft boundary between indoor (in-lab) and outdoor (in-campus) deployments, which can be enabled by a quasi-transparent RF path extension based on analog radio over fiber (RoF). The use of in-house and commercially ready hardware are separately addressed as complementary solutions for coexisting testbeds.