Hailing cloud empowered radio access networks

Radio access networks empowered by CRAN is a new design paradigm that is drawing the attention of many researchers today to tackle the growing complexity of provisioning broadband wireless services. Because of the need to provide high data rates and better coverage simultaneously, operators are maintaining heterogeneous networks with cells of various sizes, ranging from femtocells to macrocells. Moving the provisioning of wireless network services for all users in collective cells to a central cloud can reduce the otherwise embedded costs and improve processing power performance by dynamically scaling up and down . For interference mitigation, cognitive radio technology can be used to dynamically provide information on spectrum availability over time and space to central processing base station units located in the cloud. In this article, we delve into all these aspects including mobile cloud computing to leverage the concept of cloud empowered radio access networks for future wireless communication needs of 5G networks. We provide an architecture for CRAN. In particular, we discuss in detail the cognitive-radio-based interference mitigation strategy and provide a media access control protocol for the proposed framework that uses this overlay interference mitigation strategy.