Joint Fiber Wireless Resource Allocation to support the Cell Free operation

Cell-Free (CF) technology is considered as a candidate to support the “5G and beyond” networks, mitigating the limitations of the traditional networks in terms of flexibility and intercell interference. These networks consist of distributed Access Points (APs) that form clusters, and co-operate in time to serve the User Equipment (UE) demands. The number of the AP that participate in a cluster and the level at which they cooperate impacts both the achieved spectral efficiency and the size of the utilized communication and processing resources, which in most cases are scarce and limited. In our work, we propose mechanisms that perform joint allocation of fiber and wireless resources in a converged fiber-wireless infrastructure, consisting of a TWDM PON, mMIMO Base Stations and CF. To perform the joint allocation of the wireless and wired resources, we propose an optimal Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP). As the complexity is high and the execution time prohibitively long for real size scenarios, we also present a multi-agent rollout mechanism to efficiently tradeoff execution time with performance.