A method in a
fronthaul network (200) comprising a
radio equipment controller (210) connected to a proxy slave (230), a proxy master (240) connected to a
radio equipment (220), and an
Ethernet network (250) connecting the proxy master and the proxy slave for establishing a
Common Public Radio Interface, CPRI, link between the
radio equipment controller and the radio equipment over the
Ethernet network is provided. The method comprises: receiving (301), at the proxy slave from the
radio equipment controller, a first CPRI bit
stream transmitted at one or more first link bit rates at one or more respective transmit times, and attempting to decode, at the proxy slave, the first CPRI bit
stream at one or more second link bit rates at one or more respective reception times; on achieving hyper frame number synchronization, HFN
Sync, at a
sync link
bit rate, mapping (302) the first CPRI bit
stream to one or more Radio over
Ethernet, RoE, frames, at least one of the one or more RoE frames comprising a header indicating the
sync link
bit rate; transmitting the one or more RoE frames to the proxy master; on receiving one or more RoE frames from the proxy master, the one or more RoE frames received from the proxy master comprising a second CPRI bit stream transmitted by the radio equipment, de-mapping (305) the one or more RoE frames received from the proxy master; transmitting the second CPRI bit stream to the
radio equipment controller at the first
sync bit rate; and upon HFN
Sync being achieved between the proxy slave and the
radio equipment controller using the sync link bit rate, communicating between the radio equipment controller and the radio equipment via the established CPRI link using the sync link bit rate.