Integrated Photonic Filters in Support of Converged 5G Mobile Fronthaul & Midhaul Transport Layers

A Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)-enabled analog mobile fronthaul architecture is presented supporting enhanced flexibility by exploiting the fine filtering properties of a fully reconfigurable, silicon photonics-based filtering element. Numerical studies are presented emphasizing on the flexibility, low-energy consumption, and the compatibility of our proposed chip-scale implementations with the analog Radio over Fiber (RoF)-based mobile transport. Proof-of-concept analog photonic processing of 1 Gbaud Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK)-modulated radio is successfully demonstrated through RoF transmission experiments. The integration of the analog mobile fronthauling segment in a WDM-enabled, Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM)-assisted fronthaul/midhaul infrastructure supporting low-latency edge computing is also discussed.