  Common Public Radio Interface (CPRI) is a successful industry cooperation
defining the publicly available specification for the key internal interface of
radio base stations between the radio equipment control (REC) and the radio
equipment (RE) in the fronthaul of mobile networks. However, CPRI is expensive
to deploy, consumes large bandwidth, and currently is statically configured. On
the other hand, an Ethernet-based mobile fronthaul will be cost-efficient and
more easily reconfigurable. Encapsulating CPRI over Ethernet (CoE) is an
attractive solution, but stringent CPRI requirements such as delay and jitter
are major challenges that need to be met to make CoE a reality. This study
investigates whether CoE can meet delay and jitter requirements by performing
FPGA-based Verilog experiments and simulations. Verilog experiments show that
CoE encapsulation with fixed Ethernet frame size requires about tens of
microseconds. Numerical experiments show that the proposed scheduling policy of
CoE flows on Ethernet can reduce jitter when redundant Ethernet capacity is
provided. The reduction in jitter can be as large as 1 {\mu}s, hence making
Ethernet-based mobile fronthaul a credible technology.
