2018/06/02 by Patil, Pratik, Dai, Binbin, Yu, Wei · 1 citation
#FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.00673
This paper studies transmission strategies for the downlink of a cloud radio access network, in which the base stations are connected to a centralized cloud-computing based processor with digital fronthaul or backhaul links. We provide a system-level performance comparison of two fundamentally different strategies, namely the data-sharing strategy and the compression strategy, that differ in the way the fronthaul/backhaul is utilized. It is observed that the performance of both strategies depends crucially on the available fronthaul or backhaul capacity. When the fronthaul/backhaul capacity is low, the datasharing strategy performs better, while under moderate-to-high fronthaul/backhaul capacity, the compression strategy is superior. Using insights from such a comparison, we propose a novel hybrid strategy, combining the data-sharing and compression strategies, that allows for better control over the fronthaul/backhaul capacity utilization. An optimization framework for the hybrid strategy is proposed. Numerical evidence demonstrates the performance gain of the hybrid strategy.