QoE-Guaranteed and Power-Efficient Network Operation for Cloud Radio Access Network With Power Over Fiber

Abstract

A concept of cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) is becoming a popular solution to support the required communication quality for new emerging service in the future network environment, i.e., more than 10 Gbps capacity, less than 1 ms latency, and connectivity for numerous devices. In this paper, we envision a C-RAN based on passive optical network (PON) exploiting power over fiber (PoF), which achieves low installation and operation costs since it is capable of providing communication services without external power supply for large amount of remote radio heads (RRHs). This network, however, needs to reduce the optical transmission power of PoF due to the fiber fuse issue. Additionally, the diversification of services, devices, and personality indicates the need to improve user satisfaction, i.e., quality of experience (QoE), based on the user's perspective, which is different from previous approaches that aim to guarantee quality of services (QoS). Therefore, we propose a QoE-guaranteed and power-efficient network operation strategy. Our proposed operation is able to reduce the transmission power while satisfying the QoE constraint by controlling both the schedule of RRH's sleep and optical transmission power of PoF. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our proposed operation scheme is evaluated through extensive computer simulations.