Techno-economics of fiber versus microwave for mobile transport network deployments

One of the challenges network operators face is designing and deploying cost-efficient transport networks (TNs) to meet the high capacity and strict latency/reliability requirements of today's emerging services. Therefore, different aspects, including the appropriate technology, the level of reconfigurability, and the functional split option, need to be considered. A crucial aspect of network design is assessing the impact of these factors against the total cost of ownership (TCO), latency, and reliability performance of a given solution. Therefore, this paper proposed a framework to investigate the TCO, latency, and reliability performance of a set of fiber and microwave-based TN architectures. They were categorized based on their baseband functional split option and the reconfigurability capabilities of the equipment used. The results, based on real data from a non-incumbent operator, show that, in most of the considered scenarios, a microwave-based TN exhibits a lower TCO than a fiber-based one. The TCO gain may vary with the functional split option, geo-type, reconfigurability features, fiber trenching costs, and cost of microwave equipment, with a more significant impact in a dense urban geo-type, where for a low-layer functional split option, the fiber- and microwave-based architectures have a comparable TCO. Finally, it was found that the considered fiber and microwave architectures have almost similar average latency and connection availability performance. Both are suitable to meet the service requirements of 5G and beyond 5G services in most of the considered scenarios. Only in extreme latency-critical scenarios, a small number of the cells might not fully satisfy the latency requirements of a low-layer split option due to multiple microwave hops in the microwave-based architecture.