FBMC in Next-Generation Mobile Fronthaul Networks With Centralized Pre-Equalization

In this letter, we proposed a centralized pre-equalization mechanism in a fiber-wireless integrated mobile fronthaul system to compensate the channel degradation among multiple component carriers (CCs) with reduced complexity and cost at user terminals. Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and filter-bank multicarrier (FBMC) with and without frequency-domain pre-equalization are compared in a 50-GHz radio-over-fiber testbed. In comparison, FBMC with the proposed pre-equalization performs better because asynchronous up-link CCs can be quasi-seamlessly aggregated without interference, which enables baseband-unit (BBU) pool to precisely estimate the channel quality and perform pre-equalization for multiple bands with high spectral efficiency. Bidirectional transmission experiments are conducted with two independent asynchronous user terminals controlled by one BBU pool. An error vector magnitude of