Joint Precoding Design and Resource Allocation for C-RAN Wireless Fronthaul Systems

Abstract: This paper investigates the resource allocation problem combined with fronthaul precoding and access link sparse precoding design in cloud radio access network (C-RAN) wireless fronthaul systems.Multiple remote antenna units (RAUs) in C-RAN systems can collaborate in a cluster through centralized signal processing to realize distributed massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems and obtain performance gains such as spectrum efficiency and coverage.Wireless fronthaul is a flexible, low-cost way to implement C-RAN systems, however, compared with the fiber fronthaul network, the capacity of wireless fronthaul is extremely limited.Based on this problem, this paper first design the fronthaul and access link precoding to make the fronthaul capacity of RAUs match the access link demand.Then, combined with the precoding design problem, the allocation optimization of orthogonal resources is studied to further optimize the resource allocation between fronthaul link and access link to improve the performance of the system.Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed precoding design and resource allocation optimization algorithm.