Cloud RAN (C-RAN) is a promising enabler for distributed massive MIMO systems, yet is vulnerable to its fronthaul congestion. To cope with the limited fronthaul capacity, this paper proposes a hybrid analog-digital precoding design that adaptively adjusts fronthaul compression levels and the number of active radio-frequency (RF) chains out of the entire RF chains in a downlink distributed massive MIMO system based on C-RAN architecture. Following this structure, we propose an analog beamformer design in pursuit of maximizing multi-user sum average data rate (sum-rate). Each element of the analog beamformer is constructed based on a weighted sum of spatial channel covariance matrices, while the size of the analog beamformer, i.e. the number of active RF chains, is optimized so as to maximize the large-scale approximated sum-rate. With these analog beamformer and RF chain activation, a regularized zero- forcing (RZF) digital beamformer is jointly optimized based on the instantaneous effective channel information observed through the given analog beamformer. The effectiveness of the proposed hybrid precoding algorithm is validated by simulation, and its design criterion is clarified by analysis.
In C-RAN architecture, different configuration of precoding function splits between RRHs and the BBU have been proposed and summarized in @cite_2 @cite_31 , including the design with the RRHs being capable only of analog beamforming which is of our interest. For a given precoding design, fronthaul compression schemes to comply with the limited fronthaul capacity have been investigated via an information theoretic approach @cite_23 @cite_10 and under the use of a scalar quantizer @cite_34 @cite_12 . In these works, fronthaul forwarding information is compressed and the level of compression is adjusted so as to meet the fronthaul capacity. More compression, i.e. coarse quantization levels, induces larger quantization noise, ending up with deteriorating the useful received signal. The precoder is therefore optimized accordingly, which poses another challenge under limited fronthaul capacity that may not allow frequent CSI exchange between RRHs and the BBU and or bring about outdated CSI.
@cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_31 @cite_34 @cite_10 @cite_12
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The performance of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is constrained by the limited fronthaul link capacity under future heavy data traffic. To tackle this problem, extensive efforts have been devoted to design efficient signal quantization compression techniques in the fronthaul to maximize the network throughput. However, most of the previous results are based on information-theoretical quantization methods, which are hard to implement practically due to the high complexity. In this paper, we propose using practical uniform scalar quantization in the uplink communication of an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based C-RAN system, where the mobile users are assigned with orthogonal sub-carriers for transmission. In particular, we study the joint wireless power control and fronthaul quantization design over the sub-carriers to maximize the system throughput. Efficient algorithms are proposed to solve the joint optimization problem when either information-theoretical or practical fronthaul quantization method is applied. We show that the fronthaul capacity constraints have significant impact to the optimal wireless power control policy. As a result, the joint optimization shows significant performance gain compared with optimizing only wireless power control or fronthaul quantization. Besides, we also show that the proposed simple uniform quantization scheme performs very close to the throughput performance upper bound, and in fact overlaps with the upper bound when the fronthaul capacity is sufficiently large. Overall, our results reveal practically achievable throughput performance of C-RAN for its efficient deployment in the next-generation wireless communication systems. This paper investigates the compress-and-forward scheme for an uplink cloud radio access network (C-RAN) model, where multi-antenna base stations (BSs) are connected to a cloud-computing-based central processor (CP) via capacity-limited fronthaul links. The BSs compress the received signals with Wyner-Ziv coding and send the representation bits to the CP; the CP performs the decoding of all the users’ messages. Under this setup, this paper makes progress toward the optimal structure of the fronthaul compression and CP decoding strategies for the compress-and-forward scheme in the C-RAN. On the CP decoding strategy design, this paper shows that under a sum fronthaul capacity constraint, a generalized successive decoding strategy of the quantization and user message codewords that allows arbitrary interleaved order at the CP achieves the same rate region as the optimal joint decoding. Furthermore, it is shown that a practical strategy of successively decoding the quantization codewords first, then the user messages, achieves the same maximum sum rate as joint decoding under individual fronthaul constraints. On the joint optimization of user transmission and BS quantization strategies, this paper shows that if the input distributions are assumed to be Gaussian, then under joint decoding, the optimal quantization scheme for maximizing the achievable rate region is Gaussian. Moreover, Gaussian input and Gaussian quantization with joint decoding achieve to within a constant gap of the capacity region of the Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink C-RAN model. Finally, this paper addresses the computational aspect of optimizing uplink MIMO C-RAN by showing that under fixed Gaussian input, the sum rate maximization problem over the Gaussian quantization noise covariance matrices can be formulated as convex optimization problems, thereby facilitating its efficient solution. MIMO and cloud radio access network (C-RAN) are promising techniques for implementing future wireless communication systems, where a large number of antennas are deployed either being co-located at the base station or totally distributed at separate sites called remote radio heads (RRHs), both to achieve enormous spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency gains. Here, we consider a general antenna deployment method for wireless networks, termed multi-antenna C-RAN, where a flexible number of antennas can be equipped at each RRH to more effectively balance the performance and fronthaul complexity tradeoff beyond the conventional massive MIMO and single-antenna C-RAN. To coordinate and control the fronthaul traffic over multi-antenna RRHs, under the uplink communication setup, we propose a new “spatial-compression-and-forward (SCF)” scheme, where each RRH first performs a linear spatial filtering to denoise and maximally compress its received signals from multiple users to a reduced number of dimensions, then conducts uniform scalar quantization over each of the resulting dimensions in parallel, and finally sends the total quantized bits via a finite-rate fronthaul link to the baseband unit (BBU) for joint information decoding. Under this scheme, we maximize the minimum SINR of all users at the BBU by a joint resource allocation over the wireless transmission and fronthaul links. Specifically, each RRH determines its own spatial filtering solution in a distributed manner to reduce the signaling overhead with the BBU, while the BBU jointly optimizes the users’ transmit power, the RRHs’ fronthaul bits allocation, and the BBU’s receive beamforming with fixed spatial filters at individual RRHs. Numerical results show that, given a total number of antennas to be deployed, multi-antenna C-RAN with the proposed SCF and joint optimization significantly outperforms both massive MIMO and single-antenna C-RAN under practical fronthaul capacity constraints. The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a promising network architecture for future mobile communications, and one practical hurdle for its large scale implementation is the stringent requirement of high capacity and low latency fronthaul connecting the distributed remote radio heads (RRH) to the centralized baseband pools (BBUs) in the C-RAN. To improve the scalability of C-RAN networks, it is very important to take the fronthaul loading into consideration in the signal detection, and it is very desirable to reduce the fronthaul loading in C-RAN systems. In this paper, we consider uplink C-RAN systems and we propose a distributed fronthaul compression scheme at the distributed RRHs and a joint recovery algorithm at the BBUs by deploying the techniques of distributed compressive sensing (CS). Different from conventional distributed CS, the CS problem in C-RAN system needs to incorporate the underlying effect of multi-access fading for the end-to-end recovery of the transmitted signals from the users. We analyze the performance of the proposed end-to-end signal recovery algorithm and we show that the aggregate measurement matrix in C-RAN systems, which contains both the distributed fronthaul compression and multiaccess fading, can still satisfy the restricted isometry property with high probability. Based on these results, we derive tradeoff results between the uplink capacity and the fronthaul loading in C-RAN systems.