More than 20 telcos, including Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Ericsson, Nokia and NEC, have partnered to trial an integrated fronthaul and backhaul technology demonstration.
Today the consortium, which also comprises universities and research organisations, will hold the 5G-Crosshaul trial at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin.
The project is aimed at developing a system of flexible and unified management for 5G network architectures. It uses InterDigital’s EdgeLink technology, which is a wireless transport solution that uses a 60GHz data link to enable mesh network connectivity.
In a statement, wireless vendor InterDigital said the demonstration would show how a multiplex of backhaul and fronthaul traffic could be carried over the same millimetre wave, by using a software defined networking mesh controller for mmwave small cells.
Alan Carlton, Vice President, InterDigital Europe, said: “Various research and standardization forums leading the development of 5G have aligned on the vision that fronthaul and backhaul will converge.
“This demonstration validates the industry-wide alignment and showcases how the technology presented is an important ingredient to enable a cost effective and scalable 5G network, by providing a wireless solution for the transport of fronthaul and backhaul data.”
The Crosshaul project has been funded by the European Union and aims to develop solutions to help cope with explosive growth in data consumption.
The target is to develop solutions that result in a network capacity increase of 20 percent, latencies of less than one millisecond and a 30 reduction in total cost of ownership.