Common Public Radio Interface
Common Public Radio Interface
Common Public Radio Interface
The Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) protocol consists of a specification that enables flexible and efficient product differentiation for radio base stations and independent technology evolution for RE and REC. In other word, the goal of CPRI is to allow base stations manufacturers to share a common protocol and more easily adapt platforms from one customer to the other. Besides that, CPRI focuses on simplified radio base station architecture by dividing the radio base station into a radio and a control part, by specifying one new interface. The groups cooperating on defining CPRI specifications are Ericsson AB, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, NEC Corporation, Nortel Networks Ltd, Alcatel Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG.
For the transfer of user plane, control and management information (C&M) as well as synchronization information between REC and RE, CPRI defines 2 layer protocols:
The user plane information is sent in the form of IQ data. These IQ data coming from different antenna carriers are multiplexed by a time division multiplexing scheme onto an electrical or optical transmission line. C&M data are sent either as inband protocol (for time critical signaling data) or by layer 3 protocols (not defined by CPRI) that reside on top of appropriate layer 2 protocols. Two additional layer 2 protocols for C&M data, which are High level Data Link Control (HDLC) and Ethernet, are also supported by CPRI. These control and management data are time multiplexed with the IQ data. Any type of vendor specific information is also transferred with the additional time slots.
Information flow
Description
IQ data
user plane information of in-phase and quadrature modulation data (digital baseband signals)
Synchronization
L1 Inband Protocol
information related to the link and is directly transported by the physical layer for system start-up
C&M data
control and management information exchanged between the control and management entities within the REC and RE
Protocol Extensions
information reserved for future protocol extensions, may be used for more complex interconnection topologies or other radio standards
1x (614.4 Mbps)
2x (1228.8 Mbps)
4x (2457.6 Mbps)
Notice that all CPRI line bit rates have been chosen in a way that the basic UMTS chip rate of 3.84 Mbps can be recovered in a cost-efficient way from the line bit rate taking into account the 8b/10b coding. For example, the 1228.8 Mbps correspond to an encoder rate of 122.88 MHz for the 8b/10b encoder and a subsequent frequency division by a factor of 32 provides the basic UMTS chip rate. The length of a basic frame is 1 Tchip = 1/3.84 MHz = 260.416667 ns. There are 256 basic frames in a hyper frame (HFN = 66.67 s) and an UMTS radio frame consists of 150 hyper frames (10 ms). Below are CPRI basic frame structures:
Index Description
bit index (0 to 7)
Topologies
Three topologies are supported by AIF module in CPRI mode: Star chain: multiple point-to-point links between a REC and several Res