China Telecom conducts world's first 5G OTN forwarding equipment test

Recently, China Telecom successfully conducted the first 5G OTN front transmission bearer test at the Beijing Research Institute, which is the world's first eCPRI interface standard for 5G front transmission since the global wireless industry standards organization CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) Alliance released it in August 2017. This is the world's first transmission bearer test for 25G rate eCPRI since the global wireless industry standard organization CPRI (Common Public Radio Interface) released the eCPRI interface standard for 5G forward transmission.

The test was launched in late January 2018, and major communications equipment vendors such as Huawei, ZTE and Fiberhome responded positively to participate and successfully completed the test. The test results show that all three mainstream vendors' 5G OTN front-end equipment can already support the industry's mainstream 25G eCPRI front-end transmission interface and perform well in key performance indicators such as latency and delay jitter. Even for the most demanding uRLLC (Ultra-Reliable & Low Latency) business scenarios in 5G applications (for autonomous driving and other services), the 5G OTN front-end equipment has demonstrated excellent performance in terms of single-node transmission latency of around 1 microsecond (us) and nanosecond (ns) level latency jitter, all of which can meet the bearing requirements. It can meet the bearing requirements.

The first phase of testing completed so far focuses on verifying the service bearing capability and key performance such as transmission delay and jitter. In the service bearing capacity test, OTN front-end equipment from various vendors can provide 100G bps line bandwidth, supporting simultaneous access to three 25G eCPRI 5G front signals and multiple low-rate CPRI 4G front signals or other service signals such as GE and 10GE. In the delay and delay jitter performance tests, the equipment outperformed the application requirements by more than one order of magnitude, and the technology complied with the M-OTN (Mobile-optimized OTN) standard jointly promoted by China Telecom and the world's five largest carriers in the ITU-T for metro mobile bearer and DCI applications. The relevant technology meets the requirements of the M-OTN (Mobile-optimized OTN) standard proposal jointly promoted by China Telecom and the five global carriers in the ITU-T for urban mobile bearer and DCI applications. The test results fully demonstrate that OTN equipment for 5G forward bearer can not only meet the high bandwidth demand, but also has low latency and low latency jitter performance advantages, and also indicates that the industry chain has the ability to rapid commercial deployment.

5G commercialization, bearing first. China Telecom will continue to lead the standard direction in the development of 5G industry, and lead the testing of technical solutions and commercial trials of existing networks, to put the industrial promotion work into practice. OTN technology with large bandwidth, low latency and other characteristics seamlessly connect to the 5G bearing needs, is bound to play an important role in the 5G bearer network. The recently concluded ITU-T SG15 plenary meeting has also formally established a project to study the application of OTN technology in 5G bearer networks. China Telecom firmly believes that by uniting the industry upstream and downstream cooperation, M-OTN technology solution can provide the most excellent transmission performance for 5G bearer and bring unlimited possibilities for the expansion of 5G innovative services.