Reducing the 5G Fronthaul Traffic with O-RAN

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile communications wm demand a huge increase in the digital data traffic. The 5Gwm provide bandwidth of at least 100 Mbls per user for an ever increasing number of users. This is prohibitive using Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) protocol. In order to address this issue, two new fronthaul protocols, named enhanced CPRI (eCPRI) and Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN), have been recently deployed. This paper presents, for the first time, the amount of resource blocks (RBs) per user needed to ensure the minimum data rate of 100 Mb/s per user, and we use the computed minimum value of RBs to compare the fronthaul traffic demanded by the O-RAN protocol with the traffic provided by the CPRI legacy.