Economical-energy-efficient resource allocation for cache-enabled cloud radio access networks

Taking advantage of both edge cache (EC) and coordinated processing, cache-enabled cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have shown good potential to become a solution for future wireless networks. With the demand that the network needs to be fast, green and affordable, it has become an issue both practical and challenging to design a resource allocation strategy that leads to a proper balance among throughput, energy consumption and the cost of the cache-enabled C-RAN system. In this article, the economical energy efficiency (E³) metric is adopted as a feasible way to comprehensively evaluate the impacts in these aspects. Based on the constraints of both remote radio heads (RRHs) association and fronthaul capacity, an E³ optimization problem with the resource allocation for cache-enabled C-RAN is formulated as a nonconvex objective function. An algorithm is devised to achieve the sub-optimal solution for the problem afterwards. Simulation results confirm that the proposed method can significantly enhance the E³ performance of the cache-enabled C-RAN system.