In this paper, we investigate the downlink secure beamforming (BF) design problem of cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) relying on multicast fronthaul, where millimeter-wave and microwave carriers are used for the access links and fronthaul links, respectively. The base stations (BSs) jointly serve users through cooperating hybrid analog/digital BF. We first develop an analog BF for cooperating BSs. On this basis, we formulate a secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem subject both to a realistic limited fronthaul capacity and to the total BS transmit power constraint. Due to the intractability of the non-convex problem formulated, advanced convex approximated techniques, constrained concave convex procedures and semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation are applied to transform it into a convex one. Subsequently, an iterative algorithm of jointly optimizing multicast BF, cooperative digital BF and the artificial noise (AN) covariance is proposed. Next, we construct the solution of the original problem by exploiting both the primal and the dual optimal solution of the SDP-relaxed problem. Furthermore, a per-BS transmit power constraint is considered, necessitating the reformulation of the SRM problem, which can be solved by an efficient iterative algorithm. We then eliminate the idealized simplifying assumption of having perfect channel state information (CSI) for the eavesdropper links and invoke realistic imperfect CSI. Furthermore, a worst-case SRM problem is investigated. Finally, by combining the so-called $\mathcal{S}$-Procedure and convex approximated techniques, we design an efficient iterative algorithm to solve it. Simulation results are presented to evaluate the secrecy rate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
This work studies the advantages of coded multicasting for the downlink of a Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) system equipped with a multicast fronthaul link. In this system, a control unit (CU) in the baseband processing unit (BBU) pool is connected to distributed edge nodes (ENs) through a multicast fronthaul link of finite capacity, and the ENs have baseband processing and caching capabilities. Each user equipment (UE) requests a file in a content library which is available at the CU, and the requested files are served by the closest ENs based on the cached contents and on the information r…
Fog networks benefit from content caching at edge nodes (ENs) as well as fronthaul connectivity to the cloud. In previous works, both dedicated and multicast fronthaul links has been considered under different assumptions with Normalized Delivery Time (NDT) as a standard to measure the performance. While dedicated links has been studied extensively in different caching scenarios, multicast links has been developed under assumption of 2-by-2 fog network where cloud is connected to two ENs serving two users. The extension to arbitrary number of ENs and users only provides the lower bound on the …
In this paper, we investigate the joint beamforming and power splitting design problem in a base station (BS) cluster-based cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with multicast fronthaul, where users are jointly served by BSs within each cluster. Meanwhile, each user can simultaneously obtain information and energy from received signals. On this basis, under predefined minimum harvested energy of each user and maximum transmit power of each BS and central processor, we formulate a sum rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing multicast fronthaul beamforming, cooperative access beamforming a…
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…
Fog Radio Access Network (F-RAN) exploits cached contents at edge nodes (ENs) and fronthaul connection to the cloud for content delivery. Assuming dedicated fronthaul links between cloud and each EN, previous works focused on analyses of F-RANs using offline or online caching depending whether the content popularity is time-invariant or time-variant. Extension has been done for multicast fronthaul link connecting cloud to only two ENs and time-invariant popularity. In contrast, the scope of this work is on the case where multicast fronthaul link connects arbitrary number of ENs to the cloud an…
This paper aims to characterize the synergy of distributed caching and wireless fronthaul in a fog radio access network (Fog-RAN) where all edge nodes (ENs) and user equipments (UEs) have a local cache and store contents independently at random. The network operates in two phases, a file-splitting based decentralized cache placement phase and a fronthaul-aided content delivery phase. We adopt normalized delivery time (NDT) to characterize the asymptotic latency performance with respect to cache size and fronthaul capacity. Both an achievable upper bound and a theoretical lower bound of NDT are…
There are two fundamentally different fronthaul techniques in the downlink communication of cloud radio access network (C-RAN): the data-sharing strategy and the compression-based strategy. Under the former strategy, each user's message is multicast from the central processor (CP) to all the serving remote radio heads (RRHs) over the fronthaul network, which then cooperatively serve the users through joint beamforming; while under the latter strategy, the user messages are first beamformed then quantized at the CP, and the compressed signal is unicast to the corresponding RRH, which then decom…
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 …
In this paper, we study the design of a hybrid precoder, consisting of an analog and a digital precoder, for the delivery phase of downlink cache-enabled millimeter wave (mmWave) radio access networks (CeMm-RANs). In CeMm-RANs, enhanced remote radio heads (eRRHs), which are equipped with local cache and baseband signal processing capabilities in addition to the basic functionalities of conventional RRHs, are connected to the baseband processing unit via fronthaul links. Two different fronthaul information transfer strategies are considered, namely, hard fronthaul information transfer, where ha…
We consider the analysis and design of distributed wireless networks wherein remote radio heads (RRHs) coordinate transmissions to serve multiple users on the same resource block (RB). Specifically, we analyze two possible multiple-input multiple-output wireless fronthaul solutions: multicast and zero forcing (ZF) beamforming. We develop a statistical model for the fronthaul rate and, coupled with an analysis of the user access rate, we optimize the placement of the RRHs. This model allows us to formulate the location optimization problem with a statistical constraint on fronthaul outage. Our …
In this paper, we investigate the problem of asynchronous coded caching in fog radio access networks (F-RANs). To minimize the fronthaul load, the encoding set collapsing rule and encoding set partition method are proposed to establish the relationship between the coded-multicasting contents for asynchronous and synchronous coded caching. Furthermore, a decentralized asynchronous coded caching scheme is proposed, which provides asynchronous and synchronous transmission methods for different delay requirements. The closed-form expression of the fronthaul load is established for the special case…
Cell-free massive MIMO systems have promising data rate and uniform coverage gains. These systems, however, typically rely on optical fiber based fronthaul for the communication between the central processing unit (CPU) and the distributed access points (APs), which increases the infrastructure cost, leads to high installation time, and limits the deployment flexibility and adaptability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two architectures for cell-free massive MIMO systems based on wireless fronthaul that is operating at a \textit{higher-band} compared to the access links: (i) A…
The potential of using millimeter-wave (mmWave) to encounter the current bandwidth shortage has motivated packing more antenna elements in the same physical size which permits the advent of massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) for mmWave communication. However, with increasing number of antenna elements, the ability of allocating a single RF-chain per antenna becomes infeasible and unaffordable. As a cost-effective alternative, the design of hybrid precoding has been considered where the limited-scattering signals are captured by a high-dimensional RF precoder realized by an analog ph…
To develop a low-complexity multicast beamforming method for millimeter wave communications, we first propose a channel gain estimation method in this article. We use the beam sweeping to find the best codeword and its two neighboring codewords to form a composite beam. We then estimate the channel gain based on the composite beam, which is computed off-line by minimizing the variance of beam gain within beam coverage. With the estimated channel gain, we propose a multicast beamforming design method under the max-min fair (MMF) criterion. To reduce the computational complexity, we divide the l…
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…
This paper considers a cloud-RAN architecture with cache-enabled multi-antenna Edge Nodes (ENs) that deliver content to cache-enabled end-users. The ENs are connected to a central server via limited-capacity fronthaul links, and, based on the information received from the central server and the cached contents, they transmit on the shared wireless medium to satisfy users' requests. By leveraging cooperative transmission as enabled by ENs' caches and fronthaul links, as well as multicasting opportunities provided by users' caches, a close-to-optimal caching and delivery scheme is proposed. As a…
This work studies multigroup multicasting transmission in cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer, where densely packed remote radio heads (RRHs) cooperatively provide information and energy services for information users (IUs) and energy users (EUs), respectively. To maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of information services while satisfying the energy harvesting levels at EUs, an optimization of joint beamforming design for the fronthaul and access links is formulated, which is however neither smooth nor convex and is indeed NP-hard. T…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication is considered as an indispensable technique for the next-generation backhaul/fronthaul network thanks to its large transmission bandwidth. Especially for heterogeneous network (HetNet), the mmWave full-dimension (FD)-MIMO is exploited to establish the backhaul/fronthaul link between phantom-cell base stations (BSs) and macro-cell BSs, where an efficient precoding is prerequisite. Against this background, this paper proposes a principle component analysis (PCA)-based hybrid precoding for wideband mmWave MIMO backhaul/fronthaul channels. We first propose an…
In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient hybrid precoding design for integrated multicast-unicast millimeter wave (mmWave) system, where the simultaneous wireless information and power transform is considered at receivers. We adopt two sparse radio frequency chain antenna structures at the base station (BS), i.e., fully-connected and subarray structures, and design the codebook-based analog precoding according to the different structures. Then, we formulate a joint digital multicast, unicast precoding and power splitting ratio optimization problem to maximize the energy efficiency of…
In this paper, a joint beamforming design for max-min fair simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) is investigated in a green cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN) with millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless fronthaul. To achieve a balanced user experience for separately located data receivers (DRs) and energy receivers (ERs) in the network, joint transmit beamforming vectors are optimized to maximize the minimum data rate among all the DRs, while satisfying each ER with sufficient RF energy at the same time. Then, a two-step iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the origin…
Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication and network densification hold great promise for achieving high-rate communication in next-generation wireless networks. Cloud radio access network (CRAN), in which low-complexity remote radio heads (RRHs) coordinated by a central unit (CU) are deployed to serve users in a distributed manner, is a cost-effective solution to achieve network densification. However, when operating over a large bandwidth in the mmWave frequencies, the digital fronthaul links in a CRAN would be easily saturated by the large amount of sampled and quantized signals to be transfe…
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 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…
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 …
Multicast beamforming is known to improve spectral efficiency. However, its benefits and challenges for hybrid precoders design in millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems remain understudied. To this end, this paper investigates the first joint design of hybrid transmit precoders (with an arbitrary number of finite-resolution phase shifts) and receive combiners for mmWave multi-group multicasting. Our proposed design leverages semidefinite relaxation (SDR), alternating optimization and Cholesky matrix factorization to sequentially optimize the digital/analog precoders at the transmitter and the combi…
Immersive virtual reality (VR) applications require ultra-high data rate and low-latency for smooth operation. Hence in this paper, aiming to improve VR experience in multi-user VR wireless video streaming, a deep-learning aided scheme for maximizing the quality of the delivered video chunks with low-latency is proposed. Therein the correlations in the predicted field of view (FoV) and locations of viewers watching 360$^\circ$ HD VR videos are capitalized on to realize a proactive FoV-centric millimeter wave (mmWave) physical-layer multicast transmission. The problem is cast as a frame quality…
In this paper, we consider the uplink channel estimation phase and downlink data transmission phase of cell-free millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with low-capacity fronthaul links and low-resolution analog-to-digital converters/digital-to-analog converters (ADC/DACs). In cell-free massive MIMO, a control unit dictates the baseband processing at a geographical scale, while the base stations communicate with the control unit through fronthaul links. Unlike most of previous works in cell-free massive MIMO with finite-capacity fronthaul links, we consi…
The cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN) has recently been proposed as one cost-effective and energy-efficient technique for 5G wireless networks. By moving the signal processing functionality to a single baseband unit (BBU) pool, centralized signal processing and resource allocation are enabled in Cloud-RAN, thereby providing the promise of improving the energy efficiency via effective network adaptation and interference management. In this paper, we propose a holistic sparse optimization framework to design green Cloud-RAN by taking into consideration the power consumption of the fronthaul…
The coded caching scheme originally proposed by Maddah-Ali and Niesen (MAN) transmits coded multicast messages from a server to users equipped with caches via a capacitated shared-link and was shown to be information theoretically optimal within a constant multiplicative factor. This work extends the MAN scheme to a class of two-hop wired-wireless networks including one server connected via fronthaul links to a layer of $H$ helper nodes (access points/base stations), which in turns communicate via a wireless access network to $K$ users, each equipped with its own cache. Two variants are consid…
In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel beamforming strategy for directional frame timing synchronization in wideband millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems operating with low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In the employed system model, we assume multiple radio frequency chains equipped at the base station to simultaneously form multiple synchronization beams in the analog domain. We formulate the corresponding directional frame timing synchronization problem as a max-min multicast beamforming problem under low-resolution quantization. We first show that the formulated proble…
Explosive growth of mobile data demand may impose a heavy traffic burden on fronthaul links of cloud-based small cell networks (C-SCNs), which deteriorates users' quality of service (QoS) and requires substantial power consumption. This paper proposes an efficient maximum distance separable (MDS) coded caching framework for a cache-enabled C-SCNs, aiming at reducing long-term power consumption while satisfying users' QoS requirements in short-term transmissions. To achieve this goal, the cache resource in small-cell base stations (SBSs) needs to be reasonably updated by taking into account use…
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…
Free-space optical (FSO) links are considered as a cost-efficient way to fill the backhaul/fronthaul connectivity gap between millimeter wave (mmWave) access networks and optical fiber based central networks. In this paper, we investigate the end-to-end performance of dual-hop mixed FSO/mmWave systems to address this combined use. The FSO link is modeled as a Gamma-Gamma fading channel using both heterodyne detection and indirect modulation/direct detection with pointing error impairments, while the mmWave link experiences the fluctuating two-ray fading. Under the assumption of both amplify-an…
