Impacto de não-uniformidades em cabos de pares trançados na transmissão em modo fantasma

Abstract

In the next years, a dramatic increase in traffic demands for mobile – communication systems is expected. To support such demands, the new generation of communication, called 5G, is being developed to allow a wide range of new applications. The key point to the future success of 5G networks is the adopted fronthaul solution. In general, optical and microwave links are suitable alternatives for fronthaul. However, copper is still a viable option in some situations, mainly due to reduced cost and the application of techniques to boost the copper performance, such as the phantom mode. Such technique includes extra channels over the ordinary differential ones for the same copper system, increasing its aggregated data rate. For this purpose, the channels called “phantom” use signaling in common mode, over ordinary channels (differentials). Ideally, there is no leakage between differential channels to the phantom one. However, copper cables have non-uniformities that are the source of the signal leakage into the pairs, especially for frequencies of the order of hundreds of MHz. It is not fully understood how the cable non-uniformities affect the crosstalk from the differential to phantom mode transmission, and viceversa. In this work, effect of cable non-uniformities on the attenuation of differential and phantom channels, as well as on the crosstalk among them, is studied. To enable phantom transmission, a simulator developed by Stanford University was adapted. Three types of non-uniformities were simulated: variation in the distance between the center of pairs, pigtail and non-uniform twisted pairs, for frequencies range from DC to 500 MHz, using cable length from 10 to 100 m. The results showed: phantom mode aggregate data rate for uniform scenarios with 61.94% of contribution. Moreover, considering the same length cable, variation in the distance between the center of pairs had a big impact in the reduction of phantom channel contribution with just 24.02 %, more impact than others studied, whereas the non-uniform twists had negligible impact on channel aggregated data rate, with phantom contribution of 61.93 %. Besides that, it is shown that pigtail has impact just to short length cables.