An Insight into the Total Cost of Ownership of 5G Fronthauling

This paper provides an assessment of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a number of 5G fronthauling solutions based on digital and analog radio-over-fiber (RoF) architectures in cloud radio access network (C-RAN). We computed the capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX, OPEX) in the case of an optical fiber aggregation network based on a ring topology. Three different RoF architectures were considered: intermediate frequency analog RoF (IF-A-RoF), digital signal processing assisted analog RoF (DSP-A-RoF), and digital RoF (D-RoF) based on the common public radio interface (CPRI). A greenfield scenario considering both fiber deployment and fiber leasing was analyzed. The results presented in the paper show how the TCO changes with the number of aggregated carriers for the considered RoF architectures and fiber deployment strategy. They also reveal the impact that each cost category has on the overall CAPEX and OPEX value.