SOURCE:

Faculty: Engineering
Department: Electronic And Computer Engineering

CONTRIBUTORS:

Okeke, R. O.
Idigo, V. E.

ABSTRACT:

The increased quest for fast Internet connectivity and adoption of high bandwidth-demand applications by subscribers are motivations behind Long Term Evolution (LTE) network deployments. Unfortunately, some deployed 4G (LTE) networks are not able to meet expected data speed due to limitations experienced from the existing microwave backhaul of the operators. These existing 620Mbit/s microwave backhauls could not measure up with 4G (LTE) data speed (in Gbit/s) thereby causing latency. Some of these backhaul limitations are technical (capacity, range, reliability) whereas some are as a result of poor weather and topographical conditions. In this research, Passive Optical Network (PON) as backhaul for 4G (LTE) cellular network is designed, and the experimental test bed is SMILE 4G (LTE) Communication Network, Port Harcourt Nigeria. Network monitor and Cell Finder tools were used in determination of 60 evolved nodeBs (eNBs) coordinates under the coverage of SMILE 4G Communications, Port Harcourt. In addition, the work proposed two methods (Manual and Automatic) of computing the optimal splitter coordinates, resulting to very similar coordinates 4.82778640N, 7.0265820E and 4.82760N, 7.02540E as optimal splitter coordinates for PON deployment in Port Harcourt. Adoption of either ‘Manual’ or ‘Automatic’ method resulted to attenuation reduction and 61.74% increase in cost effectiveness of PON backhaul network deployment. Subsequently, the evaluated fibre lengths for each evolved nodeB- Optical line terminal (eNB-OLT) pair and other parameters like attenuation, connector losses, insertion losses, etc, were used for both downstream and upstream power budget analyses. Furthermore, the work developed ranging delay for all the eNBs for upstream transmission thereby preventing possible collision among eNBs during upstream transmission. Consequently, the developed 160Gbit/s PON backhaul network was validated in Optisystem simulation environment and results revealed an average Bit Error Rate (BER) of 4.88e-10. Finally, the BER performance of the existing SMILE microwave link was compared to that of the developed PON system and the developed PON network showed 99.99% performance improvement.