The emerging cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) is a promising scheme to tackle the capacity crunch in wireless networks. Designing the optimal fronthaul network in the CF-mMIMIO is of utmost importance to deploy a cost- and energy-efficient network. In this paper, we present a framework to optimally design the fronthaul network of CF-mMIMO utilizing optical fiber and free space optical (FSO) technologies. We study an uplink data transmission of the CF-mMIMO network wherein each of the distributed access points (APs) is connected to a central processing unit (CPU) through a capacity-limited fronthaul, which could be the optical fiber or FSO. Herein, we have derived achievable rates and studied the network's energy efficiency in the presence of power consumption models at the APs and fronthaul links. Although an optical fiber link has a larger capacity, it consumes less power and has a higher deployment cost than that of an FSO link. For a given total number of APs, the optimal number of optical fiber and FSO links and the optimal capacity coefficient for the optical fibers are derived to maximize the system's performance. Finally, the network's performance is investigated through numerical results to highlight the effects of different types of optical fronthaul links.
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…
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…
We consider a drone-based communication network, where several drones hover above an area and serve as mobile remote radio heads for a large number of mobile users. We assume that the drones employ free space optical (FSO) links for fronthauling of the users' data to a central unit. The main focus of this paper is to quantify the geometric loss of the FSO channel arising from random fluctuation of the position and orientation of the drones. In particular, we derive upper and lower bounds, corresponding approximate expressions, and a closed-form statistical model for the geometric loss. Simulat…
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 investigate the statistics of the free space optics (FSO) communication channel between a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a central unit. Two unique characteristics make UAV-based FSO systems significantly different from conventional FSO systems with static transceivers. First, for UAV-based FSO systems, the incident laser beam is not always orthogonal to the receiver lens plane. Second, both position and orientation of the UAV fluctuate over time due to dynamic wind load, inherent random air fluctuations in the atmosphere around the UAV, and internal vibrations of…
A major performance degrading factor in free space optical communication (FSO) systems is atmospheric turbulence. Spatial diversity techniques provide a promising approach to mitigate turbulence-induced fading. In this paper, we study the error rate performance of FSO links with spatial diversity over atmospheric turbulence channels described by the Double Generalized Gamma distribution which is a new generic statistical model covering all turbulence conditions. We assume intensity modulation/direct detection with on-off keying and present the BER performance of single-input multiple-output (S…
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…
The limited fronthaul capacity is known to be one of the main problems in cloud radio access networks (CRANs), especially in the wireless fronthaul links. In this paper, we consider the uplink of a CRAN system, where massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is utilized in the fronthaul link. Considering multi-antenna user equipment (UEs) and multi-antenna remote radio heads (RRHs), we maximize the system sum-rate by jointly optimizing the precoders at the UEs and the quantization noise covariance matrices and transmit powers at the RRHs. To solve the resulting nonconvex problem, an iterat…
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…
To reach a cost-efficient 5G architecture, the use of remote radio heads connected through a fronthaul to baseband controllers is a promising solution. However, the fronthaul links must support high bit rates as 5G networks are projected to use wide bandwidths and many antennas. Upgrading all of the existing fronthaul connections would be cumbersome, while replacing the remote radio head and upgrading the software in the baseband controllers is relatively simple. In this paper, we consider the uplink and seek the answer to the question: If we have a fixed fronthaul capacity and can deploy any …
Cell-free massive MIMO provides ubiquitous connectivity for multiple users, and implementation using radio stripes is very efficient. Compared with collocated massive MIMO, the major cost includes fronthaul overheads and AP hardware. Maximum ratio combination (MRC) achieves a low fronthaul loading and low-cost AP, but the performance is bad. This letter proposes to implement a quasi-LMMSE (Q-LMMSE) processing using MRC fronthaul design. Q-LMMSE is derived from a standard LMMSE, which gains interference information from MRC signal via singular value decomposition. Simulation results show that t…
Cloud RAN (C-RAN) is a promising enabler for distributed massive MIMO systems, yet is vulnerable to its fronthaul congestion. To cope with the limited fronthaul capacity, this paper proposes a hybrid analog-digital precoding design that adaptively adjusts fronthaul compression levels and the number of active radio-frequency (RF) chains out of the entire RF chains in a downlink distributed massive MIMO system based on C-RAN architecture. Following this structure, we propose an analog beamformer design in pursuit of maximizing multi-user sum average data rate (sum-rate). Each element of the anal…
This work proposes an optimal metric for opportunistic scheduling of secondary user transmitters (SU-TXs) in underlay cognitive radio based multiple-input multiple-output radio frequency/free space optical (MIMO-RF/FSO) decode-and-forward system with fixed and proportional interference power constraints. To analyze the performance of the proposed system, the closed-form expressions are derived for the exact and asymptotic outage probabilities considering orthogonal space-time block coded transmission over Nakagami-$m$ fading RF links. Further, the FSO link between the relay and destination eNo…
This paper proposes a dimension reduction-based signal compression scheme for uplink distributed MIMO cloud radio access networks (C-RAN) with an overall excess of receive antennas, in which users are jointly served by distributed multi-antenna receivers connected to a central processor via individual finite-capacity fronthaul links. We first show that, under quantization noise-limited operation, applying linear dimension reduction at each receiver before compressing locally with a uniform quantization noise level results in a sum capacity that scales approximately linearly with fronthaul capa…
Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture is the only viable solution to handle the complex interference scenario generated by massive antennas and small cells deployment as required by next generation (5G) mobile networks. In conventional C-RAN, the fronthaul links used to exchange the signal between Base Band Units (BBUs) and Remote Antenna Units (RAUs) are based on digital baseband (BB) signals over optical fibers due to the huge bandwidth required. In this paper we evaluate the transport capability of copper-based all-analog fronthaul architecture called Radio over Copper (RoC)…
We consider cooperative radio access network architectures, especially distributed massive MIMO and Cloud RAN, considering their similarities and differences. We address in particular the major challenge posed to both by the implementation of a high capacity fronthaul network to link the distributed access points to the central processing unit, and consider the effect on uplink performance of quantization of received signals in order to limit fronthaul load. We use the Bussgang decomposition along with a new approach to MMSE estimation of both channel and data to provide the basis of our analy…
In this work we propose a fronthaul compression scheme for distributed MIMO systems with multi-antenna receivers, in which, prior to signal quantisation, dimension reduction is performed at each receiver by matched filtering the received signal with a subset of the local user channel vectors. By choosing these matched filter vectors based on global channel information, a high proportion of the potential capacity may be captured by a small number of signal components, which can then be compressed efficiently using local signal compression. We outline a greedy algorithm for selecting the matched…
We characterize the rate achievable in a bidirectional quasi-static link where several user equipments communicate with a massive multiple-input multiple-output base station (BS). In the considered setup, the BS operates in full-digital mode, the physical size of the antenna array is limited, and there exists a rate constraint on the fronthaul interface connecting the (possibly remote) radio head to the digital baseband processing unit. Our analysis enables us to determine the optimal resolution of the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters as well as the optimal number of active a…
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…
One of the first widespread uses of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) is in 5G networks, where each base station has an advanced antenna system (AAS) that is connected to the baseband unit (BBU) with a capacity-constrained fronthaul. In the AAS configuration, multiple passive antenna elements and radio units are integrated into a single box. This paper considers precoded downlink transmission over a single-cell MU-MIMO system. We study optimized linear precoding for AAS with a limited-capacity fronthaul, which requires the precoding matrix to be quantized. We propose a new pr…
Base stations in 5G and beyond use advanced antenna systems (AASs), where multiple passive antenna elements and radio units are integrated into a single box. A critical bottleneck of such a system is the digital fronthaul between the AAS and baseband unit (BBU), which has limited capacity. In this paper, we study an AAS used for precoded downlink transmission over a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) channel. First, we present the baseline quantization-unaware precoding scheme created when a precoder is computed at the BBU and then quantized to be sent over the fronthaul. We p…
This work analyzes the performance of an underlay cognitive radio based decode-and-forward mixed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio frequency/free space optical (RF/FSO) cooperative relay system with multiple mobile secondary and primary user nodes. The effect of imperfect channel state information (CSI) arising due to channel estimation error is also considered at the secondary user transmitters (SU-TXs) and relay on the power control and symbol detection processes respectively. A unique aspect of this work is that both fixed and proportional interference power constraints are employ…
Due to the relatively high cost of deploying optical fibers, free space optical (FSO) links have been developed as a cost-effective alternative technology for next generation cellular networks. However, in order to have a practical role in the physical layer of future communication systems, data rate of FSO links must be improved. To this aim, in this paper we employ a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiplexing scheme with two transceivers to increase the data rate of the considered FSO system. Unlike MIMO diversity case, the performance of MIMO multiplexing is significantly affected b…
In this work, we analyze the downlink performance of a cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output system with finite capacity fronthaul links between the centralized baseband units and the access point (APs). Conditioned on the user and AP locations, we first derive an achievable rate for a randomly selected user in the network that captures the effect of finite fronthaul capacity. Further, we present the performance analysis for two different types of network architecture, namely the traditional and the user-centric. For the traditional architecture, where each user is served by all the…
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…
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…
The implementation of a Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) with Full Dimensional (FD)-MIMO is faced with the challenge of controlling the fronthaul overhead for the transmission of baseband signals as the number of horizontal and vertical antennas grows larger. This work proposes to leverage the special low-rank structure of FD-MIMO channel, which is characterized by a time-invariant elevation component and a time-varying azimuth component, by means of a layered precoding approach, so as to reduce the fronthaul overhead. According to this scheme, separate precoding matrices are applied for the…
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…
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 free-space optical (FSO) communications can achieve high capacity with huge unlicensed optical spectrum and low operational costs. The corresponding performance analysis of FSO systems over turbulence channels is very limited, especially when using multiple apertures at both transmitter and receiver sides. This paper aim to provide the ergodic capacity characterization of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) FSO systems over atmospheric turbulence-induced fading channels. The fluctuations of the irradiance of optical channels distorted by atmospheric conditions is usually described by a g…
Cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) is an emerging technology for beyond 5G with its promising features such as higher spectral efficiency and superior spatial diversity as compared to conventional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The main working principle of cell-free mMIMO is that many distributed access points (APs) cooperate simultaneously to serve all the users within the network without creating cell boundaries. This paper considers the uplink of a cell-free mMIMO system utilizing the radio stripe network architecture with a sequential fronthaul bet…
