The Non-Coherent Ultra-Dense C-RAN Is Capable of Outperforming Its Coherent Counterpart at a Limited Fronthaul Capacity

The weighted sum rate maximization problem of ultra-dense cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) is considered, where realistic fronthaul capacity constraints are incorporated. To reduce the training overhead, pilot reuse is adopted and the transmit beamforming is designed to be robust to the channel estimation errors. In contrast to the conventional C-RAN where the remote radio heads (RRHs) coherently transmit their data symbols to the user, we consider their non-coherent transmission, where no strict phase synchronization is required. By exploiting the classic successive interference cancellation technique, we first derive the closed-form expressions of the individual data rates from each serving RRH to the user and the overall data rate for each user that is not related to their decoding order. Then, we adopt the reweighted l
₁
-norm technique to approximate the l
₀
-norm in the fronthaul capacity constraints as the weighted power constraints. A low-complexity algorithm based on a novel sequential convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is developed to solve the resultant optimization problem with convergence guarantee. A beneficial initialization method is proposed to find the initial points of the SCA algorithm. Our simulation results show that in the high fronthaul capacity regime, the coherent transmission is superior to the non-coherent one in terms of its weighted sum rate. However, significant performance gains can be achieved by the non-coherent transmission over the coherent one in the low fronthaul capacity regime, which is the case in ultradense C-RANs, where mmWave fronthaul links with stringent capacity requirements are employed.