Latency and Jitter Control in 5G Ethernet Fronthaul Network

With 5G technology, networks are expected to offer high speed with ultra-low latency among different users. Maintaining the current network architecture will lead to an unsustainable transport delay and jitters increase. Limiting the transport delay and the jitters have become a necessity for mobile network operators. The main requirement in 5G networks is the demand of limiting the transport delay. This, thesis proposes a novel mechanism to minimize packet delay and delay variation in 5G Ethernet fronthaul network. The goal is to achieve bounded delay aggregation of traffic ,suitable for application in fronthaul transport. Hybrid switching technology can be adopted to provide efficient fronthaul in 5G. Hybrid switches allows to multiplex traffics with different characteristics over the same wavelengths, thus increasing the network resource utilization. This thesis proposes a scheduling mechanism for hybrid switches to aggregate streams from the network, the Bypass traffic (BP), and the traffic from the fronthaul links, the ADD traffic, using an algorithm which looks for the time gaps in the BP stream for the insertion of the ADD traffic. The proposed strategy minimizes the delay of packets by making use of the available gaps during the transmission to limit the network latency. The size of the required time gaps, the time window, is suitably reduced by dividing the timeout time duration with number of intervals (N) with the Window reduction mechanism so that the delay variation or jitter of both aggregated streams are bounded. The results demonstrate that the aforementioned requirements are can be achieved by suitably tuning the parameters of the algorithm inputs, mainly the window reduction factor, timeout time duration and the number of intervals, resulting in values of packet delay and delay variation bounded at 10 microseconds or even lower up to 85-90percent carried load of aggregated flows. Hence, we show their suitability for delay sensitive future applications in 5G networking.