An Energy Efficient Implementation of C-RAN in HetNet

This paper introduces the Cloud-based Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture into heterogeneous network (HetNet), in which distributed antennas are connected to a cloud-based baseband processing unit through optical fibers. Among various opportunities realized by this architecture, our focus in this paper is on the spectral efficiency (SE) advantages achieved by cooperative transmission and its associated power consumption that may affect the energy efficiency (EE) of the system. A simple but efficient pre-coding scheme is proposed to reduce the computation complexity of cooperative transmission, thus lowering the associated power consumption, and a detailed power model is then developed to benchmark the various sources of energy consumption in C-RAN. Through detailed simulation, an early performance evaluation of the potentially energy efficient C-RAN implementation was demonstrated.