IEEE 1904.3 Task Force

Introduction

It has been projected that next generation cellular base stations will have uplink speeds around 10Gbps or more, serving 6 or more sectors with channel bandwidths beyond 200MHz. The anticipated cellular network architectures that include a very large number (>100) of antennas per sector drive the strong demand for an increased uplink channel capacity. Today's platforms cannot scale to meet these requirements. A networked solution is required to enable:

• Load balancing / resource pooling,
• Cooperative-mode operation (multiple antenna systems, beam-steering),
• Dynamic power management,
• Flexible mapping of the Radio over Ethernet (RoE) traffic between baseband unit (BBU) pools and remote radio unit.

Ethernet technology has demonstrated steady, cost efficient speed and capacity growth driven by the enterprise connectivity, access, and data-center markets. The Radio over Ethernet (RoE) project aims to take advantage of the Ethernet developments and specify a scalable and streamlined solution that complements, for example, the existing CPRI radio transport specification based on fixed time division-multiplexing.

The P1904.3 standard will enable the transfer of In-phase Quadrature (IQ) user-plane data, vendor specific data, and control and management (C&M) information channels across an Ethernet-based packet-switched network. The standard will foster interoperability among implementations by defining framing, the encapsulation of the information, and a common Ethernet Type for Radio over Ethernet (RoE) purposes.

Scope of the project

This standard will specify:

1. The encapsulation of digitized radio In-phase Quadrature (IQ) payload, possible vendor specific and control data channels/flows into an encapsulating Ethernet frame payload field.
2. The header format for both structure-aware and structure-agnostic encapsulation of existing digitized radio transport formats. The structure-aware encapsulation has detailed knowledge of the encapsulated digitized radio transport format content. The structure-agnostic encapsulation is only a container for the encapsulated digitized radio transport frames.
3. A structure-aware mapper for Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) frames and payloads to/from Ethernet encapsulated frames. The structure-agnostic encapsulation is not restricted to CPRI.