A Traffic Pattern Adaptive Mechanism to Bound Packet Delay and Delay Variation in 5G Fronthaul

A novel packet-based adaptive mechanism for bounding delay and delay variation in 5G Ethernet fronthaul is proposed. The mechanism enables aggregation of asynchronous traffic from fronthaul links using a traffic pattern adaptation algorithm. Traffic of a first stream is added in time-gaps of a second stream. For bounding and balancing the packet delay and delay variation between the streams, the size of the required time-gap before insertion is made adaptive. Simulation results demonstrate that through suitable tuning of the algorithm parameters, packet delay and delay variation below 10 microseconds can be achieved.