The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) provides high spectral and energy efficiency performances, low expenditures and intelligent centralized system structures to operators, which has attracted intense interests in both academia and industry. In this paper, a hybrid coordinated multi-point transmission (H-CoMP) scheme is designed for the downlink transmission in C-RANs, which fulfills the flexible tradeoff between cooperation gain and fronthaul consumption. The queue-aware power and rate allocation with constraints of average fronthaul consumption for the delay-sensitive traffic are formulated as an infinite horizon constrained partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP), which takes both the urgent queue state information (QSI) and the imperfect channel state information at transmitters (CSIT) into account. To deal with the curse of dimensionality involved with the equivalent Bellman equation, the linear approximation of post-decision value functions is utilized. A stochastic gradient algorithm is presented to allocate the queue-aware power and transmission rate with H-CoMP, which is robust against unpredicted traffic arrivals and uncertainties caused by the imperfect CSIT. Furthermore, to substantially reduce the computing complexity, an online learning algorithm is proposed to estimate the per-queue post-decision value functions and update the Lagrange multipliers. The simulation results demonstrate performance gains of the proposed stochastic gradient algorithms, and confirm the asymptotical convergence of the proposed online learning algorithm.
In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), the baseband units and radio units of base stations are separated, which requires high-capacity fronthaul links connecting both parts. In this paper, we consider the delay-aware fronthaul allocation problem for C-RANs. The stochastic optimization problem is formulated as an infinite horizon average cost Markov decision process. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, we derive a closed-form approximate priority function and the associated error bound using perturbation analysis. Based on the closed-form approximate priority function, we propose a low-…
This paper considers the uplink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) comprised of several multi-antenna remote radio units (RUs) which send the data that they received from multiple mobile users (MUs) to a central unit (CU) via a wireless fronthaul link. One of the fundamental challenges in implementing C-RAN is the huge data rate required for fronthauling. To address this issue, we employ hybrid radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) systems for the fronthaul links as they benefit from both the large data rates of FSO links and the reliability of RF links. To efficiently exploit the…
This paper considers the uplink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) comprised of several multi-antenna remote radio units (RUs) which compress the signals that they receive from multiple mobile users (MUs) and forward them to a CU via wireless fronthaul links. To enable reliable high rate fronthaul links, we employ a hybrid radio frequency (RF)/free space optical (FSO) system for fronthauling. To strike a balance between complexity and performance, we consider three different quantization schemes at the RUs, namely per-antenna vector quantization (AVQ), per-RU vector quantization (RVQ), an…
In this paper, we consider an uplink heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN), where a macro base station (BS) coexists with many remote radio heads (RRHs). For cost-savings, only the BS is connected to the baseband unit (BBU) pool via fiber links. The RRHs, however, are associated with the BBU pool through wireless fronthaul links, which share the spectrum resource with radio access networks. Due to the limited capacity of fronthaul, the compress-and-forward scheme is employed, such as point-to-point compression or Wyner-Ziv coding. Different decoding strategies are also considered. …
Cloud-based Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is a promising architecture for future cellular networks, in which Baseband Units (BBUs) are placed at a centralized location, with capacity-constrained fronthaul connected to multiple distributed Remote Radio Units (RRHs) that are far away from the BBUs. The centralization of signal processing enables the flexibility for coordinated multi-point transmission (CoMP) to meet high traffic demand of users. We investigate how to jointly optimize CoMP-cell selection and base station resource allocation so as to enhance the quality of service (QoS), subject to…
Ultra-dense (UD) wireless networks and cloud radio access networks (CRAN) are two promising network architectures for the emerging fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication systems. By jointly employing them, a new appealing network solution is proposed in this paper, termed UD-CRAN. In a UD-CRAN, millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless fronthaul is preferred for information exchange between the central processor and the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs), due to its lower cost and higher flexibility in deployment, compared to fixed optical links. This motivates our study in this paper on the …
Control data separation architecture (CDSA) is a more efficient architecture to overcome the overhead issue than the conventional cellular networks, especially for the huge bursty traffic like Internet of Things, and over-the-top (OTT) content service. In this paper, we study the optimization issue of network energy efficiency of the CDSA-based heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRAN) networks, which has heterogeneous fronthaul between control base station (CBS) and data base stations (DBSs). We first present a modified power consumption model for the CDSA-based H-CRAN, and then form…
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 due to the extremely high complexity. In this paper, we consider using practical uniform scalar quantization in the uplink communication of an orthogonal freq…
Breaking the fronthaul capacity limitations is vital to make cloud radio access network (C-RAN) scalable and practical. One promising way is aggregating several remote radio units (RRUs) as a cluster to share a fronthaul link, so as to enjoy the statistical multiplexing gain brought by the spatial randomness of the traffic. In this letter, a tractable model is proposed to analyze the fronthaul statistical multiplexing gain. We first derive the user blocking probability caused by the limited fronthaul capacity, including its upper and lower bounds. We then obtain the limits of fronthaul statist…
In this paper, the zero-forcing (ZF) precoder with max-min power allocation is proposed for cell-free millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems using low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with limited-capacity fronthaul links. The proposed power allocation aims to achieve max-min fairness on the achievable rate lower bounds of the users obtained by the additive quantization noise model (AQNM), which mimics the effect of low-resolution DACs. To solve the max-min power allocation problem, an alternating optimization (AO) method is proposed, which…
Cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO) network and its user-centric (UC) version are considered as promising techniques for the next generations of wireless networks. However, fronthaul and backhaul assignments are challenging issues in these networks. In this paper, energy efficiencies of uplink transmission for the CF- and UC-mMIMO networks are studied, wherein access points (APs) are connected to aggregation nodes (ANs) through radio frequency (RF) and/or free-space optic (FSO) fronthauls, and the ANs are connected to a central processing unit via fiber backhauls. The achievable data rates are d…
To alleviate the burdens on the fronthaul and reduce the transmit latency, the device-to-device (D2D) communication is presented in cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). Considering dynamic traffic arrivals and time-varying channel conditions, the resource allocation in C-RANs with D2D is formulated into a stochastic optimization problem, which is aimed at maximizing the overall throughput subject to network stability, interference, and fronthaul capacity constraints. Leveraging on the Lyapunov optimization technique, the stochastic optimization problem is transformed into a delay-aware optimi…
Today's mobile data traffic is dominated by content-oriented traffic. Caching popular contents at the network edge can alleviate network congestion and reduce content delivery latency. This paper provides a comprehensive and unified study of caching and delivery techniques in wireless radio access networks (RANs) with caches at all edge nodes (ENs) and user equipments (UEs). Three cache-aided RAN architectures are considered: RANs without fronthaul, with dedicated fronthaul, and with wireless fronthaul. It first reviews in a tutorial nature how caching facilitates interference management in th…
Ultra dense cloud small cell network (UDCSNet), which combines cloud computing and massive deployment of small cells, is a promising technology for the fifth-generation (5G) LTE-U mobile communications because it can accommodate the anticipated explosive growth of mobile users' data traffic. As a result, fronthauling becomes a challenging problem in 5G LTE-U UDCSNet. In this article, we present an overview of the challenges and requirements of the fronthaul technology in 5G \mbox{LTE-U} UDCSNets. We survey the advantages and challenges for various candidate fronthaul technologies such as optic…
As a promising paradigm for fifth generation (5G) wireless communication systems, cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been shown to reduce both capital and operating expenditures, as well as to provide high spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The fronthaul in such networks, defined as the transmission link between a baseband unit (BBU) and a remote radio head (RRH), requires high capacity, but is often constrained. This article comprehensively surveys recent advances in fronthaul-constrained C-RANs, including system architectures and key techniques. In particular, key te…
Cloud radio access network (CRAN), in which remote radio heads (RRHs) are deployed to serve users in a target area, and connected to a central processor (CP) via limited-capacity links termed the fronthaul, is a promising candidate for the next-generation wireless communication systems. Due to the content-centric nature of future wireless communications, it is desirable to cache popular contents beforehand at the RRHs, to reduce the burden on the fronthaul and achieve energy saving through cooperative transmission. This motivates our study in this paper on the energy efficient transmission in …
With the explosive growth of smart devices and mobile data traffic, limited fronthaul capacity has become a notable bottleneck of green communication access networks, such as cloud radio access networks(C-RANs). In this paper, we proposed a joint user association and downlink beamforming scheme for green C-RANs to minimize the network power consumption with the limited fronthaul links. We first formulate the design problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and then transformed the MINLP problem into a mixed integer second-order cone program (MI-SOCP) which is a convex program w…
This paper considers the power-efficient resource allocation problem in a cloud radio access network (C-RAN). The C-RAN architecture consists of a set of base-band units (BBUs) which are connected to a set of radio remote heads (RRHs) equipped with massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO), via fronthaul links with limited capacity. We formulate the power-efficient optimization problem in C-RANs as a joint resource allocation problem in order to jointly allocate the RRH and transmit power to each user, and fronthaul links and BBUs assign to active RRHs while satisfying the minimum required…
Massive MIMO and C-RAN are two promising techniques for implementing future wireless communication systems, where a large number of antennas are deployed either being co-located at the base station (BS) or totally distributed at separate sites called remote radio heads (RRHs). In this paper, we consider a general antenna deployment design 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 trade-off beyond the conventional massive MIMO and single-antenna C-RAN. Un…
The performance of cloud-based small cell networks (C-SCNs) relies highly on a capacity-limited fronthaul, which degrade quality of service when it is saturated. Coded caching is a promising approach to addressing these challenges, as it provides abundant opportunities for fronthaul multicast and cooperative transmissions. This paper investigates a cache-enabled C-SCNs, in which small-cell base stations (SBSs) are connected to the central processor via fronthaul, and can prefetch popular contents by applying maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. To fully capture the benefits of fronthaul mul…
The limited fronthaul capacity imposes a challenge on the uplink of centralized radio access network (C-RAN). We propose to boost the fronthaul capacity of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) aided C-RAN by globally optimizing the power sharing between channel estimation and data transmission both for the user devices (UDs) and the remote radio units (RRUs). Intuitively, allocating more power to the channel estimation will result in more accurate channel estimates, which increases the achievable throughput. However, increasing the power allocated to the pilot training will reduce the…
This paper considers the coexistence of Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) services in the uplink of Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture based on the relaying of radio signals over analog fronthaul links. While Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA) to the radio resources enables the isolation and the separate design of different 5G services, Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) can enhance the system performance by sharing wireless and fronthaul resources. This paper provides an information-theoretic perspective in the performance of …
In this paper, we investigate network-assisted full-duplex (NAFD) cell-free millimeter-wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with digital-to-analog converter (DAC) quantization and fronthaul compression. We propose to maximize the weighted uplink and downlink sum rate by jointly optimizing the power allocation of both the transmitting remote antenna units (T-RAUs) and uplink users and the variances of the downlink and uplink fronthaul compression noises. To deal with this challenging problem, we further apply a successive convex approximation (SCA) method to handl…
In an ultra-dense cloud radio access network (UD-CRAN), a large number of remote radio heads (RRHs), typically employed as simple relay nodes, are distributed in a target area, which could even outnumber their served users. However, one major challenge is that the large amount of information required to be transferred between each RRH and the central processor (CP) for joint signal processing can easily exceed the capacity of the fronthaul links connecting them. This motivates our study in this paper on a new hybrid decoding scheme where in addition to quantizing and forwarding the received si…
Next generation cellular networks will be heterogeneous with dense deployment of small cells in order to deliver high data rate per unit area. Traffic variations are more pronounced in a small cell, which in turn lead to more dynamic interference to other cells. It is crucial to adapt radio resource management to traffic conditions in such a heterogeneous network (HetNet). This paper studies the optimization of spectrum allocation in HetNets on a relatively slow timescale based on average traffic and channel conditions (typically over seconds or minutes). Specifically, in a cluster with $n$ ba…
The fronthaul (FH) is an indispensable enabler for 5G networks. However, the classical fronthauling method demands for large bandwidth, low latency, and tightly synchronized on the transport network, and only allows for point-to-point logical topology. This greatly limits the usage of FH in many 5G scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to understand and design FH for next-generation wireless access. We allow the renovated FH to transport information other than time-domain I/Q samples and to support logical topologies beyond point-to-point links. In this way, different functi…
Spectrum pooling allows multiple operators, or tenants, to share the same frequency bands. This work studies the optimization of spectrum pooling for the downlink of a multi-tenant Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) system in the presence of inter-tenant privacy constraints. The spectrum available for downlink transmission is partitioned into private and shared subbands, and the participating operators cooperate to serve the user equipments (UEs) on the shared subband. The network of each operator consists of a cloud processor (CP) that is connected to proprietary radio units (RUs) by means of…
Most work on wireless network resource allocation use physical layer performance such as sum rate and outage probability as the figure of merit. These metrics may not reflect the true user QoS in future heterogenous networks (HetNets) with many small cells, due to large traffic variations in overlapping cells with complicated interference conditions. This paper studies the spectrum allocation problem in HetNets using the average packet sojourn time as the performance metric. To be specific, in a HetNet with $K$ base terminal stations (BTS's), we determine the optimal partition of the spectrum …
To transmit a mixture of real-time and non-real-time traffic in a broadcast system, we impose a basic service rate $r_0$ for real-time traffic and use the excess rate beyond $r_0$ to transmit non-real-time traffic. Considering the time-varying nature of wireless channels, the basic service rate is guaranteed with a service outage constraint, where service outage occurs when the channel capacity is below the basic service rate. This approach is well suited for providing growing services like video, real-time TV, etc., in group transportation systems such as coach, high-speed train, and airplane…
A Fog radio access network is considered as a network architecture candidate to meet the soaring demand in terms of reliability, spectral efficiency, and latency in next generation wireless networks. This architecture combines the benefits associated with centralized cloud processing and wireless edge caching enabling primarily low-latency transmission under moderate fronthaul capacity requirements. The F-RAN we consider in this paper is composed of a centralized cloud server which is connected through fronthaul links to two edge nodes serving two mobile users through a Z-shaped partially conn…
In high-speed railway (HSR) communication systems, distributed antenna is usually employed to support frequent handover and enhance the signal to noise ratio to user equipments. In this case, dynamic time-domain power allocation and antenna selection (PAWAS) could be jointly optimized to improve the system performances. This paper consider this problem in such a simple way where dynamic switching between multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) and single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) is allowed and exclusively utilized, while the channel states and traffic demand are taken into account. The chann…
In this paper, we consider a multiple-access fading channel where $N$ users transmit to a single base station (BS) within a limited number of time slots. We assume that each user has a fixed amount of energy available to be consumed over the transmission window. We derive the optimal energy allocation policy for each user that maximizes the total system throughput under two different assumptions on the channel state information. First, we consider the offline allocation problem where the channel states are known a priori before transmission. We solve a convex optimization problem to maximize t…
In this paper, we consider the problem of joint user scheduling and dynamic pilot allocation in a Time-Division Duplex (TDD) based Massive MIMO network under varying traffic condition. One of the main problems with Massive MIMO systems is that the number of available orthogonal pilot signals is limited, and the dynamic allocation of these signals to different users is crucially needed to utilize the full benefit of these systems. In addition, pilot signals are radio resource control (RRC) configured in practice, and hence the frequent reconfiguration causes high signaling overhead and is costl…
This paper considers the unavailability of complete channel state information (CSI) in ultra-dense cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). The user-centric cluster is adopted to reduce the computational complexity, while the incomplete CSI is considered to reduce the heavy channel training overhead, where only large-scale inter-cluster CSI is available. Channel estimation for intra-cluster CSI is also considered, where we formulate a joint pilot allocation and user equipment (UE) selection problem to maximize the number of admitted UEs with fixed number of pilots. A novel pilot allocation algori…
Residual radio resources are abundant in wireless networks due to dynamic traffic load, which can be exploited to support high throughput for serving non-real-time (NRT) traffic. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve this by resource allocation with predicted time-average rate, which can be obtained from predicted average residual bandwidth after serving real-time traffic and predicted average channel gains of NRT mobile users. We show the connection between the statistics of their prediction errors. We formulate an optimization problem to make a resource allocation plan within a predic…
Fog-aided network architectures for 5G systems encompass wireless edge nodes, referred to as remote radio systems (RRSs), as well as remote cloud center (RCC) processors, which are connected to the RRSs via a fronthaul access network. RRSs and RCC are operated via Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), enabling a flexible split of network functionalities that adapts to network parameters such as fronthaul latency and capacity. This work focuses on uplink communications and investigates the cloud-edge allocation of two important network functions, namely the control functionality of rate selec…
With the rapid growth of mobile traffic demand, a promising approach to relieve cellular network congestion is to offload users' traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we investigate how the mobile users (MUs) can effectively offload traffic by taking advantage of the capability of dual-connectivity, which enables an MU to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two radio-interfaces. Offloading traffic to the AP usually reduces the MUs' mobile data cost, but often at the expense of suffering increased interferences from other MUs…
Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth of mobile data traffic, which may lead to a serious traffic burn on the wireless networks and considerable power consumption. Network densification and edge caching are effective approaches to addressing these challenges. In this study, we investigate joint long-term cache allocation and short-term content delivery in cloud small cell networks (C-SCNs), where multiple smallcell BSs (SBSs) are connected to the central processor via fronthaul and can store popular contents so as to reduce the duplicated transmissions in networks. Accordingly, a l…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) exploits the potential of the power domain to enhance the connectivity for the Internet of Things (IoT). Due to time-varying communication channels, dynamic user clustering is a promising method to increase the throughput of NOMA-IoT networks. This paper develops an intelligent resource allocation scheme for uplink NOMA-IoT communications. To maximise the average performance of sum rates, this work designs an efficient optimization approach based on two reinforcement learning algorithms, namely deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and SARSA-learning. For ligh…
This work studies the uplink of a multi-tenant cloud radio access network (C-RAN) system with spectrum pooling. In the system, each operator has a cloud processor (CP) connected to a set of proprietary radio units (RUs) through finite-capacity fronthaul links. The uplink spectrum is divided into private and shared subbands, and all the user equipments (UEs) of the participating operators can simultaneously transmit signals on the shared subband. To mitigate inter-operator interference on the shared subband, the CPs of the participating operators can exchange compressed uplink baseband signals …
The fifth generation (5G) of cellular systems is introducing Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) services alongside more conventional enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) traffic. Furthermore, the 5G cellular architecture is evolving from a base station-centric deployment to a fog-like set-up that accommodates a flexible functional split between cloud and edge. In this paper, a novel solution is proposed that enables the non-orthogonal coexistence of URLLC and eMBB services by processing URLLC traffic at the Edge Nodes (ENs), while eMBB communications are handled centrally at a cloud…
