Breaking the fronthaul capacity limitations is vital to make cloud radio access network scalable and practical. One promising way is aggregating several remote radio units (RRUs) as a cluster to share a fronthaul link, so as to enjoy the statistical multiplexing gain brought by the spatial randomness of the traffic. In this letter, a tractable model is proposed to analyze the fronthaul statistical multiplexing gain. We first derive the user blocking probability caused by the limited fronthaul capacity, including its upper and lower bounds. We then obtain the limits of fronthaul statistical multiplexing gain when the cluster size approaches infinity. Analytical results reveal that the user blocking probability decreases exponentially with the average fronthaul capacity per RRU, and the exponent is proportional to the cluster size. Numerical results further show considerable fronthaul statistical multiplexing gain even at a small to medium cluster size. Index Terms-Cloud-radio access network (C-RAN), fronthaul, statistical multiplexing, stochastic geometry.
Reference REF proposes a model to analyze the fronthaul statistical multiplexing gain brought by the spatial randomness of the traffic when aggregating several remote radio units as a cluster to share a fronthaul link.
On the Fronthaul Statistical Multiplexing Gain
IEEE Communications Letters
IEEE Communications Letters
Mathematics Computer Science