Joint Design of Digital and Analog Processing for Downlink C-RAN with Large-Scale Antenna Arrays

In millimeter-wave communication systems with large-scale antenna arrays, conventional digital beamforming may not be cost-effective. A promising solution is the implementation of hybrid beamforming techniques, which consist of low-dimensional digital beamforming followed by analog radio frequency (RF) beamforming. This work studies the optimization of hybrid beamforming in the context of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture. In a C-RAN system, digital baseband signal processing functionalities are migrated from remote radio heads (RRHs) to a baseband processing unit (BBU) in the "cloud" by means of finite-capacity fronthaul links. Specifically, this work tackles the problem of jointly optimizing digital beamforming and fronthaul quantization strategies at the BBU, as well as RF beamforming at the RRHs, with the goal of maximizing the weighted downlink sum-rate. Fronthaul capacity and per-RRH power constraints are enforced along with constant modulus constraints on the RF beamforming matrices. An iterative algorithm is proposed that is based on successive convex approximation and on the relaxation of the constant modulus constraint. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated by numerical simulation results

Centralized and partial decentralized design for the Fog Radio Access Network

Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) has been shown to be a promising network architecture for the 5G network. With F-RAN, certain amount of signal processing functionalities are pushed from the Base Station (BS) on the network edge to the BaseBand Units (BBU) pool located remotely in the cloud. Hence, partially centralized network operation and management can be achieved, which can greatly improve the energy and spectral efficiency of the network, in order to meet the requirements of 5G. In this work, the optimal design for both uplink and downlink of F-RAN are intensively investigated

Joint Design of Fronthauling and Hybrid Beamforming for Downlink C-RAN Systems

Hybrid beamforming is known to be a cost-effective and wide-spread solution for a system with large-scale antenna arrays. This work studies the optimization of the analog and digital components of the hybrid beamforming solution for remote radio heads (RRHs) in a downlink cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture. Digital processing is carried out at a baseband processing unit (BBU) in the "cloud" and the precoded baseband signals are quantized prior to transmission to the RRHs via finite-capacity fronthaul links. In this system, we consider two different channel state information (CSI) scenarios: 1) ideal CSI at the BBU 2) imperfect effective CSI. Optimization of digital beamforming and fronthaul quantization strategies at the BBU as well as analog radio frequency (RF) beamforming at the RRHs is a coupled problem, since the effect of the quantization noise at the receiver depends on the precoding matrices. The resulting joint optimization problem is examined with the goal of maximizing the weighted downlink sum-rate and the network energy efficiency. Fronthaul capacity and per-RRH power constraints are enforced along with constant modulus constraint on the RF beamforming matrices. For the case of perfect CSI, a block coordinate descent scheme is proposed based on the weighted minimum-mean-square-error approach by relaxing the constant modulus constraint of the analog beamformer. Also, we present the impact of imperfect CSI on the weighted sum-rate and network energy efficiency performance, and the algorithm is extended by applying the sample average approximation. Numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and show that the proposed algorithm is robust to estimation errors

COMPRESSIVE QUANTIZATION FOR SCALABLE CLOUD RADIO ACCESS NETWORKS

With the proliferation of new mobile devices and applications, the demand for ubiquitous wireless services has increased dramatically in recent years. The explosive growth in the wireless traffic requires the wireless networks to be scalable so that they can be efficiently extended to meet the wireless communication demands. In a wireless network, the interference power typically grows with the number of devices without necessary coordination among them. On the other hand, large scale coordination is always difficult due to the low-bandwidth and high-latency interfaces between access points (APs) in traditional wireless networks. To address this challenge, cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has been proposed, where a pool of base band units (BBUs) are connected to the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) via high bandwidth and low latency links (i.e., the front-haul) and are responsible for all the baseband processing. But the insufficient front-haul link capacity may limit the scale of C-RAN and prevent it from fully utilizing the benefits made possible by the centralized baseband processing. As a result, the front-haul link capacity becomes a bottleneck in the scalability of C-RAN. In this dissertation, we explore the scalable C-RAN in the effort of tackling this challenge. In the first aspect of this dissertation, we investigate the scalability issues in the existing wireless networks and propose a novel time-reversal (TR) based scalable wireless network in which the interference power is naturally mitigated by the focusing effects of TR communications without coordination among APs or terminal devices (TDs). Due to this nice feature, it is shown that the system can be easily extended to serve more TDs. Motivated by the nice properties of TR communications in providing scalable wireless networking solutions, in the second aspect of this dissertation, we apply the TR based communications to the C-RAN and discover the TR tunneling effects which alleviate the traffic load in the front-haul links caused by the increment of TDs. We further design waveforming schemes to optimize the downlink and uplink transmissions in the TR based C-RAN, which are shown to improve the downlink and uplink transmission accuracies. Consequently, the traffic load in the front-haul links is further alleviated by the reducing re-transmissions caused by transmission errors. Moreover, inspired by the TR-based C-RAN, we propose the compressive quantization scheme which applies to the uplink of multi-antenna C-RAN so that more antennas can be utilized with the limited front-haul capacity, which provide rich spatial diversity such that the massive TDs can be served more efficiently