Comparison of Analogue and Digital Fronthaul for 5G MIMO Signals

This paper investigates architectural and capacity issues associated with analogue and digital radio over fibre fronthaul for MIMO in 5G cellular systems. The capacity of both systems is evaluated in terms of a static system deployment and also with varying traffic load. The results show that in a leased line scenario, the analogue systems offer an opportunity to reduce the cost of fibre infrastructure by more than 93% due to the more efficient use of bandwidth. but since the ARoF equipment is currently more expensive than the DRoF equivalent, there is a trade-off between CAPEX and OPEX for a given deployment.