A novel packet-based adaptive mechanism for
bounding delay and delay variation in 5G Ethernet fronthaul is
proposed. The mechanism enables aggregation of asynchronous
traffic from fronthaul links using a traffic pattern adaptation
algorithm. Traffic of a first stream is added in time-gaps of a
second stream. For bounding and balancing the packet delay and
delay variation between the streams, the size of the required
time-gap before insertion is made adaptive. Simulation results
demonstrate that through suitable tuning of the algorithm parameters,
packet delay and delay variation below 10 microseconds
can be achieved.