Over-the-Air Computation via Cloud Radio Access Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores enhancing over-the-air computation in wireless networks by integrating Cloud-RAN architecture, addressing capacity bottlenecks with joint transceiver and quantization design, and demonstrating improved performance over existing solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Cloud-RAN based framework for AirComp, including a joint design algorithm for transceivers and quantization, to overcome fronthaul capacity limitations.

Findings

Proposed architecture outperforms existing solutions in simulations.

Joint design algorithm effectively manages fronthaul capacity constraints.

Demonstrates significant densification gains in large-scale wireless data aggregation.

Abstract

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) has recently been recognized as a promising scheme for a fusion center to achieve fast distributed data aggregation in wireless networks via exploiting the superposition property of multiple-access channels. Since it is challenging to provide reliable data aggregation for a large number of devices using AirComp, in this paper, we propose to enable AirComp via the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN) architecture, where a large number of antennas are deployed at separate sites called remote radio heads (RRHs). However, the potential densification gain provided by Cloud-RAN is generally bottlenecked by the limited capacity of the fronthaul links connecting the RRHs and the fusion center. To this end, we formulate a joint design problem for AirComp transceivers and quantization bits allocation and propose an efficient algorithm to tackle this problem. Our numerical results shows the advantages of the proposed architecture compared with the state-of-the-art solutions.