The traffic in mobile access networks is increasing at an exponential rate, with the majority of this traffic being generated indoor. To cope with this trend, heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures based on the centralized radio architecture (CRA) concept have been recently proposed. A CRA network is able to reach high wireless network performance by centralizing the radio physical layer functions of macro and small cells. On the other hand, a CRA network puts strict latency and capacity requirements on the transport segment, which usually comprises a mixture of fiber- and copper-based infrastructure. These strict constraints may translate into high deployment costs if not carefully addressed. This paper proposes an optimized deployment strategy for CRA networks in residential areas. The objective of the proposed strategy is to contain the total deployment cost by minimizing the number of wireless and transport resources required. We demonstrate that our deployment strategy allows for a significant reduction of the required amount of network components and the overall network cost compared to the existing deployment solutions.
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