In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), the baseband processing of theavailable macro- or pico/femto-base stations (BSs) is migrated to controlunits, each of which manages a subset of BS antennas. The centralizedinformation processing at the control units enables effective interferencemanagement. The main roadblock to the implementation of C-RANs hinges on theeffective integration of the radio units, i.e., the BSs, with the backhaulnetwork. This work first reviews in a unified way recent results on theapplication of advanced multiterminal, as opposed to standard point-to-point,backhaul compression techniques. The gains provided by multiterminal backhaulcompression are then confirmed via extensive simulations based on standardcellular models. As an example, it is observed that multiterminal compressionstrategies provide performance gains of more than 60% for both the uplink andthe downlink in terms of the cell-edge throughput.
展开▼
