Cooperative transmission in cloud RAN considering fronthaul capacity and cloud processing constraints

Abstract

We investigate the cooperative transmission design for the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) considering fronthaul capacity and cloud processing constraints. Specifically, we consider the joint transmission scheme where the baseband signals and precoding vectors are processed and calculated by the cloud, which are delivered over the fronthaul links to the remote radio heads (RRHs) to form the RF signals for being transmitted to the users. We formulate the joint optimization problem for precoding design and allocation of RRHs, fronthaul capacity, and BBU processing resources to minimize the total transmission power subject to QoS constraints of the users. We present both optimal exhaustive search algorithm and two low-complexity algorithms to solve the resource allocation problem where the first one can achieve the Pareto optimality and the second one can determine an efficient solution with pretty low complexity. Numerical results confirm the excellent performance of the proposed low-complexity algorithms.