"It's time to rethink current fronthaul solutions and addressing the major challenges for CRAN deployment is critical," said Dr. Chih-Lin I, chief scientist of China Mobile Research Institute. "New efficient and flexible fronthaul solutions are being worked on for the enablement of large scale CRAN deployment and our work with Xilinx will surely accelerate the delivery of such solutions."

Xilinx is contributing to the NGFI eco-system with a validated NGFI reference design on its Zynq SoC platform. The reference design, which can easily be migrated to other Zynq and Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC devices, will serve as a baseline framework for 4.5G/5G wireless network research.

"Current 'hard' mobile networks are plagued with a number of serious challenges including time to market, service innovation, energy efficiency, TCO and interoperability," said Sunil Kar, vice president of wireless communications at Xilinx.

"Through our close collaboration with China Mobile Research Institute, we are working to address these challenges and identify the key technologies and components for highly optimized next generation fronthaul interfaces."