Integer-Forcing Architectures for Uplink Cloud Radio Access Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces an integer-forcing framework for uplink cloud radio access networks that operates near optimally in terms of outage probability, especially when base stations have full channel state information, and performs competitively with existing strategies.

Contribution

It proposes a novel integer-forcing approach for compression in uplink cloud radio networks, achieving near-optimal outage performance with partial or full channel state information at base stations.

Findings

Operates within a constant gap from optimal outage probability with full CSI.

Competitive performance compared to Wyner-Ziv-based strategies.

Effective in scenarios with no transmitters' channel state information.

Abstract

Consider an uplink cloud radio access network where users are observed simultaneously by several base stations, each with a rate-limited link to a central processor, which wishes to decode all transmitted messages. Recent efforts have demonstrated the advantages of compression-based strategies that send quantized channel observations to the central processor, rather than attempt local decoding. We study the setting where channel state information is not available at the transmitters, but known fully or partially at the base stations. We propose an end-to-end integer-forcing framework for compression-based uplink cloud radio access, and show that it operates within a constant gap from the optimal outage probability if channel state information is fully available at the base stations. We demonstrate via simulations that our framework is competitive with state-of-the-art Wyner-Ziv-based strategies.