Incorporating URLLC and Multicast eMBB in Sliced Cloud Radio Access Network

The fifth generation (5G) wireless systems aims to differentiate its services based on different application scenarios. Instead of constructing different physical networks to support each application, radio access network (RAN) slicing is deemed as a prospective solution to help operate multiple logical separated wireless networks in a single physical network. In this paper, we incorporate two typical 5G services, i.e., enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) and Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC), in a cloud RAN (C-RAN), which is suitable for RAN slicing due to its high flexibility. In particular, for eMBB, we make use of multicasting to improve the throughput, and for URLLC, we leverage finite blocklength capacity to capture the delay accurately. Our objective is to minimize the total power consumption, subject to the limited physical resource constraints. We formulate the problem as a nonconvex optimization problem and exploit efficient approaches to solve it, such as successive convex approximation and semidefinite relaxation. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm saves system power consumption significantly.