Interface Method Between Remote Radio Unit And Centralized Transceiver Station

• US 20080199183A1
• Filed: 07/13/2004
• Published: 08/21/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 07/13/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: UTStarcom Telecom Company Limited (UTStarcom Holdings Corp.)
• Original Assignee: UTStarcom Telecom Company Limited (UTStarcom Holdings Corp.)
• Inventors: Liu, Sheng, Li, Yulin
• Granted Patent: US 7,653,083 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 398/103
• CPC Class Codes: H04J 2203/0035 Radio
• CPC Class Codes: H04J 3/0682 by delay compensation, e.g. by compensation of propagation delay or variations thereof, by ranging
• CPC Class Codes: H04J 3/1617 carrying packets or ATM cells
• CPC Class Codes: H04J 3/1658 carrying packets or ATM cells; H04J3/1664 takes precedence for payloads with different packet types
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 88/085 Access point devices with remote components

Abstract

The present invention discloses a method for transmitting signal between a central channel processing Main Unit (MU) and one or more Remote Radio Units (RRUs) by using SDH/OTN in Centralized Base Transceiver Station system using remote radio head (RRH) technology. The method includes: dividing the communication interface between the MU and the RRUs into a user plane and a control plane, the user plane mainly for carrying I/Q sampling data concerning the user data, and the control plane mainly for carrying the data concerning control signaling; forming the I/Q sampling data concerning the user data carried by the user plane into an I/Q data frame via an I/Q data frame adaptation layer, then forming the I/Q data frame into a GFP frame via GFP and transmitting it on SDH/OTN; and carrying the control signaling of the control plane on UDP/IP and/or TCP/IP, and further carrying IP packet on PPP and forming it into a frame by HDLC, transmitting the HDLC frame including the control plane signaling on the SDH/OTN via the control character channel of the GFP frame. According to the present invention, the existing SDH/OTN transmission network is utilized directly, which further reduces the management and maintenance operation needed for signal transmission, as well as networking cost.

Claims

1. A method for transmitting signal between a central channel processing Main Unit (MU) and one or more Remote Radio Units (RRUs) in Centralized Base Transceiver Station system using remote radio head (RRH) technology, wherein the transmission channel between the central channel processing Main Unit (MU) and the one or more RRUs uses Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH)/Optical Transmission Network (OTN), the method comprising:

dividing the communication interface between the MU and the RRUs into a user plane and a control plane, the user plane mainly for carrying I/Q sampling data concerning the user data, and the control plane mainly for carrying the data concerning control signaling;

forming the I/Q sampling data concerning the user data carried by the user plane into an I/Q data frame via an I/Q data frame adaptation layer, then forming the I/Q data frame into a GFP frame via Generic Framing Procedure (GFP) and transmitting it on SDH/OTN; and

carrying the control signaling of the control plane on User Data Protocol (UDP)/Internet Protocol (IP) and/or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP), and further carrying IP packet on Point to Point Protocol (PPP) and forming it into a frame by High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC), transmitting the HDLC frame including the control plane signaling on the SDH/OTN via control character channel of the GFP frame.

2. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, further configuring the communication interface between the RRU and the MU, so that the RRU-MU interface can support the transmission of a plurality of carrier frequency wireless signals, and support the transmission of multi-antenna signals corresponding to the same carrier frequency and ensure that the transmission time delays of respective antenna signals are the same during transmission in the wireless BTS system adopting multi-antenna technology.

3. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, wherein the step of forming the I/Q data frame into a GFP frame via GFP at the interface between the RRU and the MU includes:

transmitting the wireless signals corresponding to M carrier frequencies of each RRU respectively by respective super blocks of the GFP-T frame via time division multiplexing the transmission bandwidth of the GFP-T, where M≧

1.

4. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, wherein the step of forming the I/Q sampling data concerning the user data carried by the user plane into an I/Q data frame via an I/Q data frame adaptation layer includes:

sequentially arranging the I/Q baseband signals of the mth carrier frequency from respective antennas at the same sampling time, where m=1, 2, . . . M,

wherein setting the sequence of the sampling values of the I/Q baseband signals from respective antennas to be the same with the spatial location sequence of antenna array or antenna group, and sequentially arranging the sampling values of the I/Q baseband signals from the same antenna according to quadrature component sampling values and In-phase component sampling values to form a single I/Q data frame.

5. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, wherein the step of forming the I/Q sampling data concerning the user data carried by the user plane into an I/Q data frame via an I/Q data frame adaptation layer includes:

sequentially arranging the I/Q baseband signals of the mth carrier frequency from respective antennas at the same sampling time, where m=1, 2, . . . M,

wherein setting the sequence of the sampling values of the I/Q baseband signals from respective antennas to be the same with the spatial location sequence of antenna array or antenna group, and sequentially arranging the sampling values of the I/Q baseband signals from the same antenna according to quadrature component sampling values and In-phase component sampling values;

sequentially arranging M I/Q data with the same sampling timing from M carrier frequencies so as to form multiple data blocks; and

sequentially arranging the multiple data blocks according to sampling time increment so as to form a single I/Q data frame.

6. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, further including the step of transmitting control plane signaling frame using the control character channel of a GFP-T client data frame, comprising:

at the transmitting end;

forming the I/Q sampling data into an I/Q data frame via the I/Q data frame adaptation layer;

processing the I/Q data frame by a transmission scheduling unit and then mapping it into a 64 B/65 B code block by a 64 B/65 B coding unit so as to form a GFP-T client data frame, wherein the 64 B/65 B code block includes a padding character and the control plane signaling frame character, as well as the data character of the I/Q data frame;

forming the formed GFP-T frame into VC (Virtual Container)/ODU (Optical Channel Data Unit) by a VC/ODU Mapping/concatenating unit, then further forming a STM-N/OTM-n frame; and

at the receiving end;

separating the corresponding VC/ODU from the STM-N/OTM-n frame and extracting its payload;

obtaining the 64 B/65 B code blocks after being processed by a GFP-T frame processing unit, separating the I/Q data frame character stream and the control plane signaling frame character stream by a 64 B/65 B decoding unit, wherein the I/Q data frame character stream is further processed by an I/Q data frame processing unit to obtain the respective I/Q data streams of respective carrier frequencies from respective antennas.

7. The method for transmitting signal of claim 6, wherein the definition of the control character in the code block is:

the most significant bit b7 indicating whether the following bytes in the 64 B/65 B code block is the control character;

the following b6 indicating whether the control character is a padding character;

the following b5 indicating wireless frame synchronization;

the last one in the high 4 bits, b4 being reserved for extension; and

the low 4 bits for transmitting the in-band control character stream.

8. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, wherein GFP client management frame is used to inspect and maintain the GFP transmission link of the RRU-MU interface, the GFP client management frame complying with the GFP standard of ITU-T/ANSI.

9. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, further including the step of synchronizing the wireless frames and measuring round trip transmission time delay (RTT) using a wireless frame synchronization indication bit, the step comprising:

making the wireless frame timing at MU side to be timing reference for all RRUs linked therewith;

in down stream, sending downstream I/Q data stream to the RRU via GFP-T, when wireless frame starting time at MU side appears, if the padding character is transmitted now, the wireless frame synchronization indication bit of this character is set to “

1”

, if the I/Q data frame character is transmitted now, insert a padding character at this time immediately and set the wireless frame synchronization indication bit of this character to “

1”

;

the time that the RRU receives the control character with its wireless frame synchronization indication bit set to “

1”

will be the wireless frame starting time at RRU side, a certain delay between the wireless frame timing at RRU side and that at MU side being appeared because of transmission time delay;

in up stream, sending upstream I/Q data stream to the MU via GFP-T, once the RRU has received the wireless frame synchronization indication of downstream, if the padding character is transmitted now, the wireless frame synchronization indication bit of this character is set to “

1”

, if the I/Q data frame character is transmitted now, insert a padding character at this time immediately and set the wireless frame synchronization indication bit of this character to “

1”

;

a certain delay between the wireless frame synchronization indication received by the MU from the RRU and the wireless frame timing at RRU side being appeared because of transmission time delay;

obtaining the round trip transmission time delay (RTT) estimation by calculating the difference between the wireless frame starting time fed back by the RRU and the starting time of the original wireless frame timing in the MU.

10. The method for transmitting signal of claim 9, further including the step of adjusting RRU time delay to ensure the wireless frame timing synchronized among respective cells in CBTS, the step of adjusting RRU time delay comprising:

the MU sending the wireless frame timing to respective RRUs relatively earlier or later by using the obtained RRT measurements of respective RRUs, to make the wireless frame timing of respective RRUs to be the same, so as to continuously track the RRT variations of respective RRUs and keep the wireless frame timing synchronized among respective RRUs.

11. The method for transmitting signal of claim 1, further including:

the RRU obtaining frequency reference with high stability; and

recovering or obtaining the bit synchronization clock of the I/Q data stream synchronous with that of the transmitting end when re-building I/Q data stream at the receiving end.

12. The method for transmitting signal of claim 11, further including:

both the MU and respective RRUs getting frequency reference with high stability from Global Positioning System (GPS), and using this frequency reference as the sampling clock source of the digital wireless signal data stream, so as to get digital wireless signal data stream bit timing and the frequency reference with high stability required by the RRU.

13. The method for transmitting signal of claim 11, further including:

using the feature that the continuous data stream transmitted itself has constant bit rate to recover clock for the constant data stream through Phase Locked Loop.

14. The method for transmitting signal of claim 13, further including:

in down stream;

the MU using the reference clock source with high stability to provide timing for the GFP-T framing and VC/ODU mapping model at the transmitting end of the MU-RRU interface at MU side,

the receiving end at RRU side recovering the digital wireless signal data stream clock using the PLL based on First In First Out (FIFO), at the same time the clock is also the reference frequency source of the RRU; and

in up stream;

the GFP-T framing and VC/ODU mapping model at the transmitting end of the MU-RRU interface at RRU side sending data using the synchronization clock obtained in down stream,

the receiving end at MU side providing timing for the GFP-T frame decoding and VC/ODU demapping model, using the above reference clock source in the MU;

the clock of the STM-N/OTM-n interface at the transmitting/receiving end being directly extracted from SDH/OTN line, instead of using the above client data clock.