A novel network design and operation for reducing transmission power in cloud radio access network with power over fiber

As the number of mobile users and the variety of contents increase, future access networks need to improve their capacity and latency. The concept of Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN), which densely deploys a large number of Remote Radio Heads (RRHs), presents a solution to guarantee such communication quality. However, the network still suffers cost issues related to power line supply to a large number of RRHs. Therefore, in this paper, we describe our envisioned C-RAN based on Passive Optical Network (PON) exploiting Power over Fiber (PoF), which is able to provide communication services without external power supply for RRHs. We also describe the conventional network design and operation schemes. Then, power-effective network design and operation approaches to equalize the transmission power of all Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) in the assumed network are presented. Our proposed power-effective network design demonstrates how to deploy the RRHs. Also, based on the proposed design approach, we present a joint control algorithm of the sleep schedule of RRHs and the transmission power of OLTs by considering the distribution of users. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our proposed approach is evaluated through numerical calculation.