Performance Analysis of Several Functional Splits in C-RAN

Centralized/Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is a promising future mobile network architecture, which can potentially increase the capacity of mobile network meanwhile reducing operators' cost. In standard C-RAN, frequency shifting is made in Remote Radio Heads (RRHs), which are close to the antennas. Signal processing and upper layers are made in Baseband Unit (BBU) pool for multiple base stations. However, this results in high burden on the optical transport network between RRHs and BBU pool. This paper investigates new functional split architectures between RRH and BBU, to reduce the transmission throughput between RRHs and BBUs. Two new architectures are proposed and modeled for the uplink. We propose to move part of physical layer functions of the BBU to the RRH. For the proposed architectures, the transmission rate between RRHs and BBUs depends on the mobile network load, while that of current architecture is constant. Simulation results illustrate that 30 to 40 percent bandwidth can be saved when all the radio channel capacity is used, and up to 70 percent bandwidth when half of the radio channel capacity is used.