Impact of Cable Non-uniformities on the Performance of Copper Fronthaul Exploiting the Phantom Mode Transmission

The fronthaul of the future 5G networks is expected to be the bottleneck for coping with the increasing data traffic demand. Despite optical fiber is the preferred alternative for fronthaul, technologies like phantom mode has boosted the data rates over copper lines. Previous works have investigated the application of phantom mode and its interaction with differential channels, but none has addressed the potential impact of the cable non-uniformities on the overall performance of copperbased networks. In this work we carried out simulations in order to investigate such impact on both ordinary differential and phantom channels. The obtained results indicate that nonuniformities must be taken into account for realistic data rate analysis in next-generation networks.