This paper jointly optimizes the precoding matrices and the set of active remote radio heads (RRHs) to minimize the network power consumption (NPC) for a user-centric cloud radio access network (C-RAN), where both the RRHs and users have multiple antennas and each user is served by its nearby RRHs. Both users' rate requirements and per-RRH power constraints are considered. Due to these conflicting constraints, this optimization problem may be infeasible. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem in two stages. In Stage I, a low-complexity user selection algorithm is proposed to find the largest subset of feasible users. In Stage II, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem with the users selected from Stage I. Specifically, the re-weighted $l_1$-norm minimization method is used to transform the original problem with non-smooth objective function into a series of weighted power minimization (WPM) problems, each of which can be solved by the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) method. The solution obtained by the WMMSE method is proved to satisfy the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of the WPM problem. Moreover, a low-complexity algorithm based on Newton's method and the gradient descent method is developed to update the precoder matrices in each iteration of the WMMSE method. Simulation results demonstrate the rapid convergence of the proposed algorithms and the benefits of equipping multiple antennas at the user side. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is shown to achieve near-optimal performance in terms of NPC.
Downlink joint transmission by a cluster of remote radio heads (RRHs) is an essential technique for enhancing throughput in future cellular networks. This method requires global channel state information (CSI) at the processing unit that designs the joint precoder. To this end, a large amount of CSI must be shared between the RRHs and that unit. This paper proposes two contributions. The first is a new upper bound on the rate loss, which implies a lower bound on the achievable rate, obtained by a cluster of RRHs that employ joint zero-forcing (ZF) with incomplete CSI. The second contribution, …
The use of a large excess of service antennas brings a variety of performance benefits to distributed MIMO C-RAN, but the corresponding high fronthaul data loads can be problematic in practical systems with limited fronthaul capacity. In this work we propose the use of lossy dimension reduction, applied locally at each remote radio head (RRH), to reduce this fronthaul traffic. We first consider the uplink, and the case where each RRH applies a linear dimension reduction filter to its multi-antenna received signal vector. It is shown that under a joint mutual information criteria, the optimal d…
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) …
We propose a power-and rate-adaptation scheme for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), where each radio remote head (RRH) is connected to the baseband unit (BBU) pool through optical links. The RRHs jointly support the users by efficiently exploiting the enhanced spatial degrees of freedom. Our proposed scheme aims for maximizing the effective capacity (EC) of the user subject to both per-RRH average-and peak-power constraints, where the EC is defined as the maximum arrival rate that can be supported by the C-RAN under the statistical delay requirement. We first transform the EC maximization …
Group sparse beamforming is a general framework to minimize the network power consumption for cloud radio access networks (Cloud-RANs), which, however, suffers high computational complexity. In particular, a complex optimization problem needs to be solved to obtain the remote radio head (RRH) ordering criterion in each transmission block, which will help to determine the active RRHs and the associated fronthaul links. In this paper, we propose innovative approaches to reduce the complexity of this key step in group sparse beamforming. Specifically, we first develop a smoothed $\ell_p$-minimiza…
We consider the uplink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN), where massive MIMO remote radio heads (RRHs) serve as relays between users and a centralized baseband unit (BBU). Although employing massive MIMO at RRHs can improve the spectral efficiency, it also significantly increases the amount of data transported over the fronthaul links between RRHs and BBU, which becomes a performance bottleneck. Existing fronthaul compression methods for conventional C-RAN are not suitable for the massive MIMO regime because they require fully-digital processing and/or real-time full channel state inform…
In a cloud radio access network (C-RAN), distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) are coordinated by baseband units (BBUs) in the cloud. The centralization of signal processing provides flexibility for coordinated multi-point transmission (CoMP) of RRHs to cooperatively serve user equipments (UEs). We target enhancing UEs' capacity performance, by jointly optimizing the selection of RRHs for serving UEs, i.e., resource allocation (and CoMP selection). We analyze the computational complexity of the problem. Next, we prove that under fixed CoMP selection, the optimal resource allocation amounts to …
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…
Towards reducing the training signaling overhead in large scale and dense cloud radio access networks (CRAN), various approaches have been proposed based on the channel sparsification assumption, namely, only a small subset of the deployed remote radio heads (RRHs) are of significance to any user in the system. Motivated by the potential of compressive sensing (CS) techniques in this setting, this paper provides a rigorous description of the performance limits of many practical CS algorithms by considering the performance of the, so called, oracle estimator, which knows a priori which RRHs are…
The use of low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) for transmit precoding provides crucial energy efficiency advantage for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) implementation. This paper formulates a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellation range and one-bit symbol-level precoding design problem for minimizing the average symbol error rate (SER) in downlink massive MIMO transmission. A tight upper-bound for SER with low-resolution DAC precoding is first derived. The derived expression suggests that the performance degradation of one-bit precoding can be interpret…
Technische Universitaet Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute（弗劳恩霍夫海因里希·赫兹研究所）
Cloud-radio access network (C-RAN) can enable cell-less operation by connecting distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) via fronthaul links to a powerful central unit. In conventional C-RAN, baseband signals are forwarded after quantization/ compression to the central unit for centralized processing to keep the complexity of the RRHs low. However, the limited capacity of the fronthaul is thought to be a significant bottleneck in the ability of C-RAN to support large systems (e.g. massive machine-type communications (mMTC)). Therefore, in contrast to the conventional C-RAN, we propose a learning-…
This paper considers a joint transmission scheme (JT) developed for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). This proposed scheme features cooperative sets of remote radio heads (RRH) defined in a disk around each user location. The nodes belonging to each of these sets perform a weighted maximum ratio transmission to jointly serve the user. The powers allocated to the beamformers are computed at the network baseband unit, taking into account channel gains, as well an equity criterion between the users. In comparison with the existing literature, our model includes a saturation assumption, with a…
We study downlink of multiantenna cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) with finite-capacity fronthaul links. The aim is to propose joint designs of beamforming and remote radio head (RRH)-user association, subject to constraints on users' quality-of-service, limited capacity of fronthaul links and transmit power, to maximize the system energy efficiency. To cope with the limited-capacity fronthaul we consider the problem of RRH-user association to select a subset of users that can be served by each RRH. Moreover, different to the conventional power consumption models, we take into account the …
In this paper, we consider an edge cache-assisted millimeter wave cloud radio access network (C-RAN). Each remote radio head (RRH) in the C-RAN has a local cache, which can pre-fetch and store the files requested by the actuators. Multiple RRHs form a cluster to cooperatively serve the actuators, which acquire their required files either from the local caches or from the central processor via multicast fronthaul links. For such a scenario, we formulate a beamforming design problem to minimize the secure transmission delay under transmit power constraint of each RRH. Due to the difficulty of di…
This paper studies joint uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) resource allocation in user-centric orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cloud radio access network (CRAN), where the users select the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) to cooperatively serve their UL and DL transmissions over different subcarriers (SCs). The goal of this paper is to maximize the system throughput through jointly optimizing UL/DL scheduling, SC assignment, RRH grouping/clustering and power allocation under the maximum power and fronthaul capacity constraints. The problem is formulated as a mixed intege…
The diagonalization of a conventional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel into parallel and independent subchannels via singular value decomposition (SVD) is a fundamental strategy that allows the MIMO channel capacity to be achieved using scalar channel codes. This letter establishes a similar channel diagonalization result for the uplink and the downlink of a cloud radio access network (C-RAN), in which a central processor (CP) is connected to a remote radio head (RRH) serving a single user via rate-limit digital fronthaul carrying the compressed baseband signal. Specifically, we s…
Current State-of-the-Art High Throughput Satellite systems provide wide-area connectivity through multi-beam architectures. Due to the tremendous system throughput requirements that next generation Satellite Communications (SatCom) expect to achieve, traditional 4-colour frequency reuse schemes are not sufficient anymore and more aggressive solutions as full frequency reuse are being considered for multi-beam SatCom. These approaches require advanced interference management techniques to cope with the significantly increased inter-beam interference both at the transmitter, e.g., precoding, and…
This paper focuses on the design of low complexity hybrid analog/digital precoding and diversity combining in millimeter wave (mmWave) Internet of things (IoT) systems. Firstly, by exploiting the sparseness property of the mmWave in the angular domain, we propose a spatial lobes division (SLD) to group the total paths of the mmWave channel into several spatial lobes, where the paths in each spatial lobe form a low-rank sub-channel. Secondly, based on the SLD operation, we propose a low complexity hybrid precoding scheme, named HYP-SLD. Specifically, for each low-rank sub-channel, we formulate …
Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has become a promising network architecture to support the massive data traffic in the next generation cellular networks. In a C-RAN, a massive number of low-cost remote antenna ports (RAPs) are connected to a single baseband unit (BBU) pool via high-speed low-latency fronthaul links, which enables efficient resource allocation and interference management. As the RAPs are geographically distributed, the group sparse beamforming schemes attracts extensive studies, where a subset of RAPs is assigned to be active and a high spectral efficiency can be achieved. H…
Vector perturbation (VP) precoding is a promising technique for multiuser communication systems operating in the downlink. In this work, we introduce a hybrid framework to improve the performance of lattice reduction (LR) aided precoding in VP. First, we perform a simple precoding using zero forcing (ZF) or successive interference cancellation (SIC) based on a reduced lattice basis. Since the signal space after LR-ZF or LR-SIC precoding can be shown to be bounded to a small range, then along with sufficient orthogonality of the lattice basis guaranteed by LR, they collectively pave the way for…
In this work, we propose three pilot assignment schemes to reduce the effect of pilot contamination in cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Our first algorithm, which is based on the idea of random sequential adsorption (RSA) process from the statistical physics literature, can be implemented in a distributed and scalable manner while ensuring a minimum distance among the co-pilot users. Further, leveraging the rich literature of the RSA process, we present an approximate analytical approach to accurately determine the density of the co-pilot users as well as the pi…
In this paper, we study the hybrid precoding structures over limited feedback channels for massive multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We focus on the system performance of hybrid precoding under a more realistic hardware network model, particularly, with inevitable dissipation. The effect of quantized analog and digital precoding is characterized. We investigate the spectral efficiencies of two typical hybrid precoding structures, i.e., the sub-connected structure and the fully-connected structure. It is revealed that increasing signal power can compensate the performance…
