Compressed Transport of Baseband Signals in Radio Access Networks

In current wireless base station solutions it is becoming common to physically separate baseband units and radio subsystems. In many wireless technologies this architecture requires allocation of significant transport network resources. In this paper a low-latency baseband signal compression scheme is presented. The compression scheme significantly lowers the transport data rate while maintaining low levels of signal distortion, thus resulting in a lower-cost transport network. Considering the importance of packet-based networks, a number of additional novel compression schemes are proposed. They are optimized for transport networks that implement a quality-of-service (QoS) mechanism and/or multi-link transmission. The compression schemes are parameterized such that a smooth trade-off between the required signal quality and compression performance can be achieved through operator choice of the suitable parameter values. An attractive feature of these schemes is that they can be applied to different wireless technologies, with appropriate parameter settings, without disrupting the present architecture. The proposed solutions will lead to a cost-effective implementation of collocated and distributed network-centric baseband processing, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) and/or distributed antenna system (DAS) which are critical topics for the entire wireless telecommunications industry and infrastructure.