Towards system cost minimization in cloud radio access network

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is regarded as a promising solution of future mobile communication infrastructures. The key character of C-RAN is migrating conventional distributed base station functionalities into a centralized cloud baseband unit (BBU) pool, which consists of many software defined virtual machines (VMs). In this paper, we take the joint consideration of VM activation in the BBU pool and joint transmission (JT) in the coordinated remote radio heads (RRHs) cluster to minimize the system cost of C-RAN, such that the system delay constraint can be satisfied. We propose two different approaches to solve this problem, i.e., integer search (IS) approach and joint optimization (JO) approach. Simulation results suggest that our proposed algorithm is more cost-effective than the benchmark algorithms.