By adopting the new IP+Optical architecture, this solution provides unified transport of 5G fronthaul and backhaul services on one device, as well as super-large bandwidth, ultra-low latency and software-defined networking (SDN)-based traffic engineering. It is estimated that ZTE's 5G Flexhaul solution can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30 percent compared to traditional solutions.

ZTE's 5G Flexhaul solution combines Flex Ethernet and IP+Optical architecture and provides super-large flexible pipeline transport capability for 5G fronthaul and backhaul services. The 5G Flexhaul solution implements end-to-end (E2E) application of IP+Optical synergy and provides unified planning, scheduling, management and maintenance by SDN controllers.

IP+Optical integrated devices are used in the mass access layer to reduce network construction costs and save equipment room space. It implements super-large-bandwidth transport by multi-wavelength connection between adjacent nodes. Additionally, with the FlexE feature, it can flexibly isolate sub-channels of different services to provide optimal forwarding plane support for 5G bearer network slicing.

In addition to super-large pipeline transport capability, the 5G Flexhaul solution has flexible transport latency capability. The latency budget allocated to the fronthaul network by 5G cloud radio-access network (C-RAN) is less than 100us. In the forwarding plane, the 5G Flexhaul solution supports fast forwarding and ordinary forwarding modes, which can be selected according to the service type.