Statistical Distribution of Packet Inter-Arrival Rates in an Ethernet Fronthaul

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This paper investigates the effects of background traffic streams in the packet inter-arrival rates of an LTE traffic stream, when these streams are transported over the same Ethernet fronthaul network. Contention of background traffic with LTE traffic can occur in a Cloud-RAN that is transporting traffic streams originating from Constant Bit-Rate (CBR) sources such as the Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) and from other non-CBR sources originating from different LTE physical layer functional subdivisions. Packet inter-arrival statistics are important in such a network, as they can be used to estimate and/or predict buffer sizes in receiving network nodes. Buffer management will also be important for traffic streams originating from functional splits (such as direct LTE MAC transport block transportation) where user plane data and control primitives have to be time aligned at the receiving node.