Power Optimization With BLER Constraint for Wireless Fronthauls in C-RAN

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a novel architecture for future mobile networks to sustain the exponential traffic growth thanks to the exploitation of centralized processing. In C-RAN, one data processing center or baseband unit (BBU) communicates with users via distributed remote radio heads (RRHs), which are connected to the BBU via high capacity, low latency fronthaul links. In this letter, we study C-RAN with wireless fronthauls due to their flexibility in deployment and management. First, a tight upper bound of the system block error rate (BLER) is derived in closed-form expression via union bound analysis. Based on the derived bound, adaptive transmission schemes are proposed. Particularly, two practical power optimizations based on the BLER and pair-wise error probability (PEP) are proposed to minimize the consumed energy at the RRHs while satisfying the predefined quality of service (QoS) constraint. The premise of the proposed schemes originates from practical scenarios where most applications tolerate a certain QoS, e.g., a nonzero BLER. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated via intensive simulations.