Nokia has unveiled the 1830 Time-sensitive Packet Switch (TPS) family of packet-optical transport switches with time-sensitive networking (TSN) capabilities. The company says the 1830 TPS platforms will provide packet-based transport for mobile fronthaul, which in turn will shrink the cost and complexity of cloud radio access network (RAN) deployments.
The 1830 TPS platforms will support existing and new radio interface protocols, thus making them applicable to unified support of 4G and 5G networks. In the latter instance, the switches are designed, thanks to strict traffic prioritization and frame pre-emption capabilities, to enable the deterministic paths through a switched Ethernet network that 5G cloud RANs are expected to require, says Nokia. Meanwhile, high-precision timing provides accurate synchronization for 5G radios, and the ability to map Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) streams enables the 1830 TPS to achieve nearly 40% greater bandwidth efficiency than competing alternatives, Nokia asserts.
For 4G, radio-over-Ethernet encapsulation enables the 1830 TPS to transport legacy CPRI streams together with native Ethernet traffic, including eCPRI and traditional backhaul traffic, onto a unified time-sensitive network. “As our customers roll out end-to-end 5G architectures, they need transport solutions that support existing fronthaul and backhaul traffic, as well as cloud RAN architectures with optimized performance,” explained Marcus Weldon, CTO and president of Bell Labs at Nokia. “The 1830 TPS allows them to optimize the end-to-end transport of their deployed 4G and new 5G radio access networks with a single platform.”
With the introduction of the 1830 TPS, we are fundamentally improving the economics of deploying 5G centralized and Cloud RANs,” added Sam Bucci, senior vice president of optical networking at Nokia. “With time-sensitive networking, mobile operators will be able to usher in new real-time services to better monetize network investments while making the transition to cloud-native architectures that introduce better performance, flexibility, and cost savings of up to 50% compared to existing fronthaul alternatives.”
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