  With the emergence of Cloud-RAN as one of the dominant architectural
solutions for next-generation mobile networks, the reliability and latency on
the fronthaul (FH) segment become critical performance metrics for applications
such as the Tactile Internet. Ensuring FH performance is further complicated by
the switch from point-to-point dedicated FH links to packet-based multi-hop FH
networks. This change is largely justified by the fact that packet-based
fronthauling allows the deployment of FH networks on the existing Ethernet
infrastructure. This paper proposes to improve reliability and latency of
packet-based fronthauling by means of multi-path diversity and erasure coding
of the MAC frames transported by the FH network. Under a probabilistic model
that assumes a single service, the average latency required to obtain reliable
FH transport and the reliability-latency trade-off are first investigated. The
analytical results are then validated and complemented by a numerical study
that accounts for the coexistence of enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and
Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency (URLLC) services in 5G networks by comparing
orthogonal and non-orthogonal sharing of FH resources.
