Performance Evaluation of Multiterminal Backhaul Compression for Cloud Radio Access Networks

TL;DR

This paper reviews and evaluates multiterminal backhaul compression techniques in cloud radio access networks, demonstrating significant performance improvements in cell-edge throughput through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It provides a unified review of recent multiterminal backhaul compression methods and confirms their effectiveness with extensive simulation results.

Findings

Multiterminal compression yields over 60% throughput gains.

Performance improvements are observed in both uplink and downlink.

Simulations confirm the advantages of advanced compression techniques.

Abstract

In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), the baseband processing of the available macro- or pico/femto-base stations (BSs) is migrated to control units, each of which manages a subset of BS antennas. The centralized information processing at the control units enables effective interference management. The main roadblock to the implementation of C-RANs hinges on the effective integration of the radio units, i.e., the BSs, with the backhaul network. This work first reviews in a unified way recent results on the application of advanced multiterminal, as opposed to standard point-to-point, backhaul compression techniques. The gains provided by multiterminal backhaul compression are then confirmed via extensive simulations based on standard cellular models. As an example, it is observed that multiterminal compression strategies provide performance gains of more than 60% for both the uplink and the downlink in terms of the cell-edge throughput.