Joint Multiuser Downlink Beamforming and Admission Control for Green Cloud-RANs with Limited Fronthaul Based on Mixed Integer Semi-definite Program

TL;DR

This paper addresses joint downlink beamforming and admission control in green Cloud-RANs with limited fronthaul, proposing optimization algorithms to improve user admission and reduce power consumption while satisfying QoS and capacity constraints.

Contribution

It formulates the joint problem as a mixed-integer semidefinite program and develops both near-optimal and sub-optimal algorithms for practical solutions.

Findings

The proposed algorithms effectively improve user admission rates.

The methods significantly reduce network power consumption.

Simulations validate the effectiveness of the algorithms.

Abstract

With the dense deployment of the remote radio heads (RRHs), the huge network power consumption has become a great challenge for green cloud radio access networks (Cloud-RANs), and multiuser downlink beamforming has been proposed as a promising solution. Moreover, the increasing number of mobile users (MUs) causes that admission control is essential for Cloud-RAN with limited fronthaul capacity and predefined power budget. In this paper, we consider the problem of joint multiuser downlink beamforming and admission control (JBAC) to enhance the admitted MUs in the network and reduce the network power consumption, while taking into account the Quality of Service requirements of the MUs, the power budget constraints and fronthaul limitation. It is shown that the JBAC problem is a mixed integer nonlinear problem, and still non-convex even though the continuous relaxation is adopted. Therefore, we first transform the JBAC problem into a Mixed-Integer Semidefinite Program. Then, we propose a bound improving Branch and Bound algorithm to yield the near-optimal solution. For practical application, a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm is proposed to derive the sub-optimal solution. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system configurations to show the effectiveness of the proposed two schemes.