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Table of Contents
C-RAN............................................................................................................................................... i
The Road Towards Green RAN ..................................................................................................... i
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1
1.1 Background ......................................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Vision of C-RAN .................................................................................................................. 1
1.3 Objectives of this White Paper ....................................................................................... 2
1.4 Status of this White Paper ............................................................................................... 2
2 Challenges of Todays RAN ............................................................................................... 3
2.1 Large Number of BS and Associated High Power Consumption .............................. 3
2.2 Rapid Increasing CAPEX/OPEX of RAN.......................................................................... 4
2.3 Explosive Network Capacity Need with Falling ARPUs............................................... 6
2.4 Dynamic mobile network load and low BS utilization rate ....................................... 7
2.5 Growing Internet Service Pressure on Operators Core Network............................ 7
3 Architecture of C-RAN ......................................................................................................... 9
3.1 Advantages of C-RAN ..................................................................................................... 11
3.2 Technical Challenges of C-RAN ..................................................................................... 12
4 Technology Trends and Feasibility Analysis ...................................................................... 13
4.1 Wireless Signal Transmission on Optical Network.................................................... 13
4.2 Dynamic Radio Resource Allocation and Cooperative Transmission/Reception . 20
4.3 Large Scale Baseband Pool and Its Interconnection ........................................................... 22
4.4 Open Platform Based Base Station Virtualization ................................................................ 24
4.5 Distributed Service Network ................................................................................................. 27
5 Evolution Path ...................................................................................................................... 28
5.1 C-RAN Centralized Base Station Deployment ........................................................... 28
5.2 Multi-standard SDR and Joint Signal Processing ...................................................... 28
5.3 Virtual BS on Real-time Cloud Infrastructure ............................................................ 28
6 Recent Progress .................................................................................................................. 30
6.1 TD-SCDMA and GSM Field Trial .................................................................................... 30
6.2 Large Scale Baseband Pool Equipment Development ............................................. 35
6.3 C-RAN prototype based on General Purpose Processor ................................................... 37
7 Conclusions ........................................................................................................................... 39
8 Acknowledgement .............................................................................................................. 40
9 Terms and Definitions ....................................................................................................... 41
10 Reference ............................................................................................................................ 43
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
Todays mobile operators are facing a strong competition environment. The cost to build,
operate and upgrade the Radio Access Network (RAN) is becoming more and more expensive
while the revenue is not growing at the same rate. The mobile internet traffic is surging, while
the ARPU is flat or even decreasing slowly, which impacts the ability to build out the networks
and offer services in a timely fashion.. To maintain profitability and growth, mobile operators
must find solutions to reduce cost as well as to provide better services to the customers.
On the other hand, the proliferation of mobile broadband internet also presents a unique
opportunity for developing an evolved network architecture that will enable new applications
and services, and become more energy efficient.
The RAN is the most important asset for mobile operators to provide high data rate, high
quality, and 24x7 services to mobile users. Traditional RAN architecture has the following
characteristics: first, each Base Station (BS) only connects to a fixed number of sector
antennas that cover a small area and only handle transmission/reception signals in its coverage
area; second, the system capacity is limited by interference, making it difficult to improve
spectrum capacity; and last but not least, BSs are built on proprietary platforms as a vertical
solution. These characteristics have resulted in many challenges. For example, the large
number of BSs requires corresponding initial investment, site support, site rental and
management support. Building more BS sites means increasing CAPEX and OPEX. Usually, BSs
utilization rate is low because the average network load is usually far lower than that in peak
load; while the BS processing power cant be shared with other BSs. Isolated BSs prove costly
and difficult to improve spectrum capacity. Lastly, a proprietary platform means mobile
operators must manage multiple none-compatible platforms if service providers want to
purchase systems from multiple vendors. Causing operators to have more complex and costly
plan for network expansion and upgrading. To meet the fast increasing data services, mobile
operators need to upgrade their network frequently and operate multiple-standard network,
including GSM, WCDMA/TD-SCDMA and LTE. However, the proprietary platform means mobile
operators lack the flexibility in network upgrade, or the ability to add services beyond simple
upgrades.
In summary, traditional RAN will become far too expensive for mobile operators to keep
competitive in the future mobile internet world. It lacks the efficiency to support sophisticated
centralized interference management required by future heterogeneous networks, the flexibility
to migrate services to network edge for innovative applications and the ability to generate new
revenue from revenue from new services. Mobile operators are faced with the challenge of
architecting radio network that enable flexibility. In the following sections, we will explore ways
to address these challenges.
Centralized base-band pool processing, Co-operative radio with distributed antenna equipped
by Remote Ratio Head (RRH) and real-time Cloud infrastructures RAN (C-RAN) can address the
challenges the operators are faced with and meet the requirements. Centralized signal
processing greatly reduces the number of sites equipment room needed to cover the same
areas; Co-operative radio with distributed antenna equipped by Remote Radio Head (RRH)
provides higher spectrum efficiency; real-time Cloud infrastructure based on open platform and
BS virtualization enables processing aggregation and dynamic allocation, reducing the power
consumption and increasing the infrastructure utilization rate. These novel technologies provide
an innovative approach to enabling the operators to not only meet the requirements but
advance the network to provide coverage, new services, and lower support costs.
C-RAN is not a replacement for 3G/B3G standards, only an alternative approach to current
delivery. From a long term perspective, C-RAN provides low cost and high performance green
network architecture to operators. In turn operators are able to deliver rich wireless services in
a cost-effective manner for all concerned.
C-RAN is not the only RAN deployment solution that will replace all todays macro cell station,
micro cell station, pico cell station, indoor coverage system, and repeaters. Different
deployment solutions have their respective advantages and disadvantages and are suitable for
particular deployment scenarios. C-RAN is targeting to be applicable to most typical RAN
deployment scenarios, like macro cell, micro cell, pico cell and indoor coverage. In addition,
other RAN deployment solution can serve as complementary deployment of C-RAN for certain
case.
Transmission,
15%
Other Support
Equipment,
3%
Management
office, 7%
Channel, 6%
Air
Conditioners,
46%
Major
Equipment,
51%
The TCO including the CAPEX and the OPEX results from the network construction and
operation. The CAPEX is mainly associated with network infrastructure build, while OPEX is
mainly associated with network operation and management.
In general, up to 80% CAPEX of a mobile operator is spent on the RAN. This means that most
of the CAPEX is related to building up cell sites for the RAN. The historical CAPEX expenditure of
2007-2012 forest are shown in Fig.2. Because 3G/B3G signals deployed frequency 2GHz have
higher path loss and penetration loss than 2G signals (deployed frequency 900MHz), multiple
cell sites are needed for the similar level of 2G coverage. Thus, the dramatic increase was
found in the CAPEX when building a 3G network.
The CAPEX is mainly spent at the stage of cell site constructions and consists of purchase and
construction
expenditures.
Purchase
expenditures
include
the
purchases
of
BS
and
supplementary equipments, such as power and air conditioning equipments etc. Construction
expenditures include network planning, site acquisition, civil works and so on. As shown is Fig.3,
it is noticeable that the cost of major wireless equipments makes up only 35% of CAPEX, while
the cost of the site acquisition, civil works, and equipment installation is more than 50% of the
total cost. Essentially, this means that more than half of CAPEX is not spent on productive
wireless functionality. Therefore, ways to reduce the cost of the supplementary equipment and
the expenditure on site installation and deployment is important to lower the CAPEX of mobile
operators.
Multi-standard environment
It is understood that the large number of legacy terminals, 2G, 3G, and B3G infrastructure will
coexist for a very long time to meet consumers demand. Most of the major mobile operators
worldwide will thus have to use two or three networks (Table 1) [1]. In the new economic
climate, operators must find ways to control CAPEX and OPEX while growing their businesses.
The base station occupies the largest part of infrastructure investment in a mobile network.
Multi-mode base station is expected as a cost efficient way for operators to alleviate the cost of
network construction and O&M. In addition, sharing of hardware resources in a multi-mode
base station is the key approach to lower cost.
Vodafone
WCDMA
One
France
Telecom
TMobile
Verizon
SK
Telecom
Telstra
China
Unicom
TD-SCDMA
CDMA
EVDO
China
Mobile
&
2000
&
LTE
increasing bandwidth of wireless broadband triggers the increase in mobile traffic, because the
mobile users can use a variety of high-bandwidth services, such as video-based applications.
This new trend will become a serious challenge to future RAN.
Based on the forecast data [2], global mobile traffic increases 66-fold with a compound annual
growth rate (CAGR) of 131% between 2008 and 2013. The similar trend is observed in current
CMCC network. On the contrary, the peak data rate from UMTS to LTE-A only increases with a
CAGR of 55%. Clearly, as shown in Fig.5, there is a large gap between the CAGR of new air
interface and the CAGR of customers need. In order to fill this gap, new infrastructure
technologies need to be developed to further improve the performance of LTE/LTE-A.
CAPEX and OPEX cost while adding little benefit to the ARPU. Additional issues are the
continuous CAPEX spending on older SGSNs & GGSNs, the higher Internet distribution cost, the
congestion on backhaul and the congestion on limited shared capacity of base stations.
Therefore, offloading the Internet traffic, as close to the base stations as possible, can be an
effective way to reduce the mobile Internet delivery cost.
3 Architecture of C-RAN
We believe Centralized processing, Cooperative radio, Cloud, and Clean (Green) infrastructure
Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is the answer to solve the challenges mentioned above. Its a
natural evolution of the distributed BTS, which is composed of the baseband Unit (BBU) and
remote radio head (RRH). According to the different function splitting between BBU and RRH,
there are two kinds of C-RAN solutions: one is called full centralization, where baseband (i.e.
layer 1) and the layer 2, layer 3 BTS functions are located in BBU; the other is called partial
centralization, where the RRH integrates not only the radio function but also the baseband
function, while all other higher layer functions are still located in BBU. For the solution 2,
although the BBU doesnt include the baseband function, it is still called BBU for the simplicity.
The different function partition method is shown in Fig.8.
Antenna
Solution 2 Solution 1
GPS
Core
network
Main
Control
& Clock
Baseband
processing
Digital
IF
Transmitter
/Receiver
PA
&
LNA
RRU
BBU
L1/L2/L3/O&M
L1/L2/L3/O&M
L1/L2/L3/O&M
Fiber
RRH
RRH
RRH
RRH
RRH
RRH
RRH
Virtual BS Pool
L2/L3/O&M
L2/L3/O&M
L2/L3/O&M
Fiber or
Microwave
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1
10
Both solutions described above are under development and evaluation. They could be properly
deployed in different networks depending on the situation of the network. The following
discussion will focus on the Fully Centralized Solution.
Capacity Improvement
In C-RAN, virtual BSs can work together in a large physical BBU pool and they can easily
share the signaling, traffic data and channel state information (CSI) of active UEs in the
system. It is much easier to implement joint processing & scheduling to mitigate inter-cell
interference (ICI) and improve spectral efficiency. For example, cooperative multi-point
processing technology (CoMP in LTE-Advanced), can easily be implemented under the CRAN infrastructure.
11
service delivery quality for various applications. The service overlapping the core network
also supplies a better experience to users.
Service on Edge
Unlike service in a data center, distributing services on the edge of the RAN has its unique
challenges. In the following research framework part, we try to summarize these challenges
into the following three categories: services on the edges integration with the RAN, intelligence
of DSN, and the deployment and management of distributed service.
12
also
improve
the
baseband
wireless
signal
transmission
delay
jitter
and
requirements indirectly. Not including the transmission medium between the round-trip time
(i.e., regardless of delays caused by the cable length), for the user plane data (IQ data) on the
CPRI/Ir/OBRI links, the overall link round-trip delay may not exceed 5s. The OBRI interface
requires periodic measurement of each link or multi-hop cable length. In terms of calibration,
the accuracy of round trip latency of each link or hop should satisfy 16.276ns [4].
System Reliability
For the reliability of the system, because the traditional optical transmission networks
(SDH/PTN) in the access network links provide reliable loop protection, automatic replace and
fiber optic link management function, C-RAN architecture in the access network must also
provide comparative reliability and manageability. In traditional RAN architecture, each BBU on
the access ring usually has access to the corresponding transmission equipment of the center
transmission machine room through SDH/PTN. Through the SDH/PTN ring routing and
13
protection function, the system can quickly switch to the safe routing mode when any point on
this loop experiences optical fiber failure, ensuring that business is not interrupted. Under the
C-RAN architecture, it also should offer a similar optical fiber ring network protection function.
Centralized BBU should support more than 10~1000 base station sites, and then the optical
fiber connected OBRI link between distributed RRH and centralized BBU is long. If only point-2point optical fiber transmission occurred between each distributed RRH and centralized BBU,
then any fault on the optical fiber link will lead to the corresponding RRH loosing service. In
order to ensure the normal operation of the whole system under the condition of any single
point of failure in the optical fiber, the CPRI/Ir/OBRI link connecting the BBU-RRH should use
fiber ring network protection technology, using the main/minor optical fiber of different
channels to realize CPRI/Ir/OBRI link real-time backup.
Cost Requirements
Finally, in terms of cost, the high speed optical module necessary for the CPRI/Ir/OBRI optical
interface will be amongst the important factors affecting the C-RAN economic structure.
Compared to traditional architecture, the wireless signal transmission data rate on C-RAN is
more than 100-200 times higher than the bearer service data rate after demodulation. Building
the fiber transportation network in developed city is very hard. This is less of an issue for
operators that already deploy optical fiber and particularly for operators own their own optical
network.
Although the cost of the optical fiber employing CPRI/Ir/OBRI for high speed wireless signal
transmission doesn't need to increase, the high speed optic module or optical transmission
equipment costs must compare to traditional SDH/PTN transmission equipment in order to
make C-RAN architecture more attractive on the CAPEX and OPEX fronts .Therefore, how to
achieve a low cost, high bandwidth and low latency wireless signal optical fiber transmission will
become a key challenge for realization of the future LTE and LTE network deployment by C-RAN.
For the above problems and corresponding technical progress trend, we will analyze and put
forward ideas for solving these problems.
frequency domain
14
parts of the RACH, Therefore, RRH cannot treat different RACH configurations transparently,
instead RRH needs to process RACH based on configuration. Since there are hundreds of
different configurations, each has to be controlled by different timing algorithms in the RRH,
which could greatly increase the complexity of system design. Therefore, considering the
implementation complexity and cost, such frequency domain compression is not feasible at
the moment.
DAGC time-domain based compression technology is a method used for IQ compression.
The basic principle of DAGC is to select the average power reference based on the best
baseband demodulation range, normalize the power of each symbol, and reduce the signal
dynamic range. DAGC compression will adversely affect system performance. The receiver
dynamic range of the uplink will be reduced, which leads to deterioration of the signal to
noise ratio.
At the same time, the EVM indicators will worsen on the downlink. With
increased compression ratio, the system performance will deteriorate even more. Currently,
we still need to investigate the impacts caused by different compression schemes.
Table 2 lists the advantages and disadvantages of various compression schemes. As
indicated, there is no ideal OBRI link data compression scheme. More studies in this area
are required.
Table 2. Comparison of Pros and Cons for Various Data Compression Techniques
Bandwidth
Compression
Schemes
Reducing signal
sampling
Non-linear
quantization
Pros
Low complexity;
Cons
Severe performance loss.
complexity.
and U law;
High compression efficiency to 53%.
IQ data
Compression
High complexity;
compression modules.
~58%;
Sub-carrier
Compression
15
On the other hand, because LTE/LTE-A has strict requirements about physical layer
treatment delay, CPRI/Ir/OBRI total transmission delay on the link should not exceed a
certain level. The physical layer HARQ process places the highest demand on processing
delay. HARQ is an important technology to improve the performance of the physical layer,
its essence is testing the physical layer on the receiving end of a sub-frame for correct or
incorrect transmission, and rapid feedback ACK/NACK to the launching end physical layer,
then let launching physical layer to make the decision whether or not to send again. If sent
again, the receiver does combined processing for multi-launching signal in the physical
layer, and then provides feedback to the upper protocol after demodulation success.
According to the LTE/LTE-A standard, the ACK/NACK HARQ on uplink and downlink process
should be finished in 3 ms after receiving the signals in the shortest case, which requires
that sub-frame processing delay in the physical layer should be generally less than 1 ms.
Because the physical layer processing itself takes 800-900 us, then CPRI/Ir/OBRI optical
transmission delay may be 100-200 us at the most. According to the light speed(200,000
kilometers per hour) estimated in the fiber, CPRI/Ir/OBRI interface maximum transmission
distance under the C-RAN framework is limited from 20 km to 40 km. Specific value is
related to delay margin the physical layer treatment itself.
promoting of
greatly improve
the
relevant
market
capacity
of the
optical
transmission module, which will help to reduce the cost of 10 Gbps optical modules. 40GE
technology is still in the research process. On the other hand, at the access network level,
1.25 G,2.5 G EPON is already widely used in solving FTTX access, 10G PON technology can
be commercial in one or two years, the future PON technological development have several
directions like WDM-PON, Hybrid PON and 40G PON.
Similar to what the Moore's Law is doing in the transformation of the semiconductor
industry, the field of optical communication has a similar trend: Every year, the speed of
optical transmission increases while the cost of the said module declines. Transceiver
modules that are capable of supporting multi-wavelength WDM have emerged in the
market place. Since commercial LTE deployment has just begun, we can safely predict that
it will take about 5 years before the commercial LTE-A multi-carrier system deployment is
needed. By then, if the optical module advancement and cost reduction has reached an
acceptable level, then the RRH-BBU bottleneck will be effectively removed.
Figure 11 shows the 2.5G SFP and 10G SFP / XFP / XENPAK optical modules pricing trends.
We can deduce that optical modules pricing has dropped by 66% to 77% in nearly 3 years,
and the trend will continue in the coming years, further reducing the cost of optical
transmission network. If this price trend continues, it would greatly help to reduce CAPEX
of a C-RAN network.
16
2500
2000
1500
66.7%
1000
54.2%
500
0
Aug-07
62.2%
Feb-08
10Km
Aug-08
40Km
Feb-09
Aug-09
10000
3000
9000
8000
35.2%
7000
6000
5000
4000
61.5%
3000
60%
2000
1000
0
Aug-07
Feb-08
550m
80Km
Aug-08
10Km
Feb-09
Aug-09
40Km
Trun
kc
able
Optical
switching box
Transmission ring
Trunk c
a
ble 1
Central apparatus
room
17
in
the
CPRI/Ir/OBRI
standard
to
satisfy
the
fiber
transport
network
management requirement.
The second solution is WDM/OTN solution. It is suitable for Macro cellular base station
systems when there is limited fiber resource, especially where the fiber resource in the
access ring is very limited, or adding new fiber in existing route is too difficult or cost is too
high. By upgrading the optical access transmission network to WDM/OTN, the bandwidth of
transporting CPRI/Ir/OBRI interface on BBU-RRH link is largely improved. Through
transmitting as many as 40 or even 80 wavelength with 10Gpbs in one fiber, it can support
a large number of cascading RRH on one pair of optical fiber. This technology can reduce
the demand of dark fiber, however, upgrading existing access ring into WDM/OTN
transmission network means higher costs. On the other hand, because the access transport
network is usually within a few tens of kilometers, the WDM/OTN equipment can be much
cheaper than those used in long distant backbone networks.
The third solution is based on CWDM technology. It combines the fixed broadband and
mobile access network transmission at the same time for indoor coverage with passive
18
optical technology, thus named as Unified PON. It can provide both PON services and
CPRI/Ir/OBRI transmission on the same fiber [5]. In this solution, an optical fiber can
support as many as 14 different wavelengths. In the UniPON standard, the uplink and
downlink channel are transmitted on two difference wavelengths, thus other free
wavelengths can be used for CPRI/Ir/OBRI data transmission between the BBU and RRH.
Because of sharing the optical fiber resources, it can reduce the overall cost. It is suitable
for C-RAN centralized baseband pool deployment of indoor coverage.
4.1.6 Summarize
Based on the above analysis, fully centralized C-RAN architecture requires a high
bandwidth, low latency, high reliability and low cost optical solution to transmit high speed
baseband signal between BBU and RRH. Its promising to find feasible solutions emerging in
the near future. However, there are still many challenges in the current solutions. For
example, current data compression schemes fail to satisfy OBRI transmission in the LTE-A
phase. The rapid development of high-speed optical modules and the associated cost
reduction is heading in the right direction but we still need a breakthrough in optical devices.
Failure protection schemes for BBU-RRH connection are able to provide similar functions to
SDH/PTN in case of fiber cut, but we still need to find solutions for unified O&M with
traditional transmission networks. UniPON based on passive WDM technology is a promising
solution for certain deployment scenarios but it must be designed to be competitive in cost.
In conclusion, we have various directions to solve the high-speed baseband signal
transmission requirement of C-RAN but we still need to explore new technology or a
combination of existing technology to find a more economical and effective solution.
Considering the technical challenges as well as the limitation in current optical network
resources, it is clear that C-RAN can be widely applied in a short time frame. Instead, a
stepped plan should be used to gradually construct the centralized network: first,
centralized deployment can be applied in some green field or replacement of old network in
a small scale. Dark fiber can be used as the BBU-RRH transmission solution. One access
ring that connects 8~12 macro sites can be centralized together, with a maximum ring
range of 40km. In the future, a larger number of macro BS in various deployment scenarios
can be further tested.
19
Many uses
various optimization techniques in trying to determine the optimal resource scheduling and the
power control solutions to maximize the total throughput of all cells with some specific
constraints. To reduce the complexity incurred in the C-RAN network architecture and the
scheduling process, the joint processing/scheduling should be limited to a number of cells
within a cluster. The complexity of scheduling among the eNBs clusters is determined by the
velocity of mobile users and the number of UEs and RRHs in the cluster. Thus, choosing an
optimal clustering approach will require balancing among the performance gain, the
requirement of backhaul capacity and the complexity of scheduling.
As shown in Fig.13, UEs will be served by one of the available clusters which are formed in a
static or semi-static way based on the feedback or measurements reports of UEs. In this
scenario, a subset of cells within a cluster will cooperate in transmission to the UEs associated
with the cluster. To further reduce the complexity, it is possible to limit the number of cells
cooperating in joint transmission to a UE at each scheduling instant. The cells in actual
transmission to a UE are called active cells for the UE. The active cells can be defined from the
UE perspective based on the signal strength (normally cells with strong signal strength are
chosen among cells within the supercell). The activation/de-activation of a cell can be done by
a super eNB, which is the control entity in cell clustering and can adjust the sets scope based
on the UE feedback.
Cell cluster 1
Cell cluster 2
Cell cluster 3
20
The JP scheme incurs a large system overhead: UE data distribution and joint
processing across multiple transmission points (TPs); and channel state information
(CSI) is required for all the TP-UE pairs.
Coordinated scheduling and/or Coordinated Beam-Forming (CBF)
With a minimum cooperation overhead, to improve the cell edge-user throughput via
coordinated beam-forming: No need for UE data sharing across multiple TPs; Each TP
only needs CSI between itself and the involved UEs (no need for CSI between other
TPs and UEs).
8
6
6.58
5.466.15
2.813.01
1.9 2.47
0.1
2.54
0
2Tx (X)/2Rx
0.2
4
2
0.3
8Tx(XXXX)/2Rx
MU-MIMO
0.078
0.056
0.101
0.047
2Tx (X)/2Rx
0.266
0.227
0.183
0.098
8Tx(XXXX)/2Rx
21
MU-MIMO
C-RAN CoMP
5.35
4.54
3.78
1.97
2Tx (X)/2Rx
8Tx(XXXX)/2Rx
2
0
0.3
SU-MIMO
MU-MIMO
0.2
0.1
0
0.07
0.041
0.039
0.075
2Tx (X)/2Rx
0.202
0.161
0.092
0.052
8Tx(XXXX)/2Rx
Technical Challenges
Cooperative transmission / reception (CT/CR) has great potentials in reducing interference and
improving spectrum efficiency of system. However, this technology has many problems that
need to be further studied before it can be applied to the practical networks. There are many
challenges listed as follows:
Coordinated Radio resource allocation and power allocation schemes for multi-cells.
capable of supporting dynamic resource allocation across different BBU, thus hard to resolve
the dynamic network load in a larger area. In the current RRH+BBU architecture, the RRH is
usually connected to a particular BBU by a fixed link, and it can only transmits its baseband
signal and O&M signaling to the BBU its connected to. This makes it difficult for another BBU to
obtain any uplink baseband data from that RRH. Similarly, any other BBU has difficulty sending
downlink baseband data to this RRH. Because of this limitation, the processing resources of
different BBUs can hardly be shared: the idle BBUs processing resources are wasted and it
cannot be used to help the BBU with a heavy workload.
The centralized baseband pool should provide a high bandwidth, low latency switch matrix with
an appropriate protocol to support the high speed, low latency and low cost interconnection
among multiple BBUs. In a medium sized dense urban network coverage (approximately 25 sq.
22
km in area), with an average distance between BS of 500m, a centralized baseband pool that
can cover the whole area needs to support about 100 BS. For a typical TD-SCDMA system with
3 sectors per macro BS and 3 carriers/sectors, it means that the centralized baseband pool
needs to support 900 TD-SCDMA carriers.
is even larger, such as 15 km X 15 km, then the baseband pool would need to support up to
1000 macro BSs carriers. Because of the limitation in the high-speed differential signal
transmission, the traditional BBU architecture cannot scale up to support such capacity by
simply expanding the backplane dimensions.
Infinite Band technology can provide significant switching bandwidth (20Gbps-40Gpbs/port)
and very low switching latency. It is widely used in supercomputers. However, the cost per port
is very high (20,000RMB) and as such does not meet the C-RAN cost requirement. Inspired by
the data center networks distributed inter-connect architecture, the centralized BBU pool in CRAN can also use a distributed optic interconnection to combine multiple BBU into a scalable
baseband pool. Based on that, the RRHs signal can be routed to any one of BBUs in the pool.
Thus load balance according to dynamic network load among BBUs can be achieved, and
system power consumption can be reduced. It also makes the deployment of multi-point MIMO
technology and interference mitigation algorithms easier, which can improve radio system
capacity.
Inter-connection between BBUs must satisfy the wireless signals requirements of low
latency, high speed, and high reliability. The requirements are similar to the CPRI/Ir/OBRI
interface, and should support real-time transmission of 2.5/6.144/10Gbps rate.
Dynamic carrier scheduling among BBUs to achieve efficient load balance within the
system and failure protection without service interruption.
Support multipoint collaboration (CoMP). It needs to consider the data flow between
different BBUs to support collaboration radio.
Fault-tolerance. Fiber inter connection should support 1+1 failure protection, BBU frame
and baseband processing board N +1 protection to achieve high system robustness.
High scalability: it can extend the system capability smoothly without services interruption.
23
Unified BBU system platform and unified processing board hardware platform to support
multi-mode through the software re-configuration. Through software
upgrades or
configuration, the same processing board can support different standards (e.g. LTE or TDSCDMA). In some of the latest products, the RRH can also be SDR-enabled to support
different standards in the same spectrum band. This solution allows the base station to be
upgraded to a new standard without changing the hardware. However, current products
usually require the BBU to restart in order to download new DSP / FPGA software for
standards upgrade. This limits the sharing of hardware between different standards.
In
fact, this prevents the dynamic resources allocation according to real-time traffic load
without interrupt of services.
Current SDR base station products partially meets the requirements of multistandards support,
however, it does not satisfy the operator flexible operation requirement of dynamically shared
resources among multiple standards, load-balancing, etc.
of
DSP
processing
resources.
On
the
other
hand,
DSP
from
different
manufacturers and even a same manufacturer cannot guarantee backwards compatibility. The
real-time operating systems are different from each other, and there is no de fact standard yet.
Generally BBUs based on DSP platform are proprietary platforms. And it is still difficult to
achieve smooth upgrading and resource virtualization.
Meanwhile, General Purpose Processors have progressed rapidly, and they are now capable of
efficiently processing wireless signals. Therefore, the telecom industry now has more choices
for software defined radio. Technology evolution in areas such as multi-core, SIMD (singleinstruction multiple data), large on-chip caches, low latency off-chip system memory are
facilitating the use of GPP in traditional signal processing applications such as baseband
24
processing in base stations. Traditional general processors usually have lower performance than
DSP in power efficiency; however, in recent years the general processor has made a lot of
improvements in this respect. Fig.14 shows the general processor technical progress in
processing performance and power consumption in nearly 6-7 years. It is can be seen that the
floating point computing capacity per watt improves very fast. These data points prove that the
evolution in GPP has made it an attractive solution for various data processing tasks in the base
station.
The advantage of GPP is that they have a long history of backward compatibility, ensuring that
software can run on each new generation of processor without any change, and this is
beneficial for smooth upgrade of the BBU. On the operating system side, there are multiple
OSs available on GPP that have real-time capability, and also allow the virtualization of BS
baseband signal processing.
Technical progress in DSP and GPP has provided more powerful signal processing with less
power consumption. This progress has made the SDR based BS solutions more attractive.
Traditional DSP has become matured solution for product, and will continue to evolve. The
advanced research on wireless signal processing on GPP has provided more choices for the base
station, and has the potential to become part of the future open, unified multi-mode BS
platform.
25
real time virtualized baseband pools will be part of the next generation wireless network, as
shown in Fig. 15. Within in given centralized baseband pool, all the physical layer processing
resources would be managed and allocated by a real time virtualized operating system. So, a
base station instance can be easily built up through the flexible resource combination. The real
time virtualized OS would adjust, allocate and re-allocate resources based on each virtualized
base station requirements, in order to meet its demands.
Physical Hardware
Processors
Processors
Processors
Processors
PHY Layer
(Signal processing)
resource pool
BS of standard 1
C
C
MAC/Trans. Layer
(Packet processing)
resource pool
A
A
M
M
P
P
BS of standard 2
C
C
Accelerator
(CODEC, cryto, etc.)
resource pool
A
A
M
M
P
P
BS of standard 3
C
C
A
A
M
M
P
P
Technical Challenges
Since wireless base stations have stringent real-time and high performance requirements,
traditional virtualization technique is challenged to solve the latency requirements of wireless
signal processing. In order to implement real time virtualized base station in a centralized base
band pool, the following challenges have to be solved:
General purpose processor and advanced processing algorithm for real time signal
processing
The high-bandwidth, low latency, low cost BBU inter-connection topology among physical
processing resources in the baseband pool. It includes the interconnection among the chips
in a BBU, among the BBUs in a physical rack, and among multiple racks.
processing
resources
management,
and
dynamic
allocation
of
physical
processing resources to each virtual base station, in order to ensure processing latency
and jitter control HW level support on virtualization in order to minimize latency.
26
Distributed Service
Network
DSN element
C-RAN element
BBU pool
BBU pool
27
5 Evolution Path
The novel C-RAN architecture is a revolution of the traditional RAN deployment. It is impossible
to replace todays RAN overnight. Moreover, the technical challenges of C-RAN should be
carefully developed and tested in labs and field environments to ensure its reliability. This
naturally leads to a step-by-step evolution path of C-RAN to gradually replace traditional RAN.
The following is our vision on how the evolution could take place:
28
Through the cooperation of BBU in the baseband pool and RRH to send and receive wireless
signals, it can be achieved that multi-standard wireless network functions in the same platform.
In the system software instructions of the baseband pool based on real-time cloud architecture,
CPRI/Ir/OBRI optical fiber transmission network and optical Internet architecture in large-scale
centralized baseband pool can send the baseband signal signals transmitted by RRH to the
virtual base station running on the designated BBU. Then virtual base station uses the
calculation resources of the designated BBU to finish the real-time processing of wireless
baseband signals. Moreover, in a C-RAN system which has several baseband pools,
CPRI/Ir/OBRI optical fiber transmission network should have the ability to forward the
baseband signals from RRHs to other baseband pools in order to improve system reliability and
realize load balance across different baseband pools.
29
6 Recent Progress
To accelerate the development and commercialization of C-RAN, China Mobile has been working
actively with industry partners. We have made good progress in field trial, large scale BBU pool
implementation, and baseband PoC based on IT platform. This chapter will first introduce the
advantages and disadvantages observed in C-RAN field trial, followed by discussion of large
scale BBU pool solution, up to 1000 carriers, based on current BBU device, and lastly the recent
R&D result of multi-mode PoC based on IT platform.
Overall situation
The first trial in Zhuhai City only took 3 months to complete. The commercial trial has 18 TDSCDMA macro sites covering about 30 square km area. This trial has verified some centralized
deployment technologies feasibility. The construction and operation of a commercial clearly
highlighted the C-RANs advantage over tradition RAN in cost, flexibility and energy savings. At
the same time, it also exposed challenges on fiber resource, as well as transmission
construction.
After that, there have been several trials on centralized deployment solutions of GSM system.
The network layout is mainly consisted of replacing and upgrading existing sites. There are
total15 sites covering 15 square km in the trial, where only 2 of them are new sites. Compared
with TD-SCDMA network, GSM solutions have
daisy-chain of 18 RRHs with only 1 pair of fiber. This could significantly reduce the number of
fiber resources needed in C-RAN centralized deployment with dark fiber solution.
The following sections will describe the network status before and after C-RAN deployment, key
technology introduced, field test results and challenges observed. .
30
these 9 sites have to be connected with new fiber channels and they are spread in 30 square
km. This is a challenge for fiber construction.
The trial area in Changsha city is consisted of a few campuses near Yuelu Mountains. The traffic
load and traffic density is quite high here. In addition, there is a lot of dormitories, and local
residential apartments. The propagation environment is very complex and the coverage KPI still
has room to be improved. This makes it suitable to verify C-RANs capacity in urban city
environment. Finally, since most of the trial sites are reusing or upgrading existing ones, there
is plenty of fiber resources.
Overall Solution
The solution starts with planning of system capacity in centralized deployment. In the Zhuhai
trial, each TD-SCDMA sites configuration is 4/4/4, which means that there are 3 sectors in
each site, and every sector has 4 carriers. Overall, the 18 trial sites need 216 carriers. When
considering the BBU pool capacity, the total BBU pool can be planned to support the maximum
co-current traffic for the same area.
There are two kinds of TD-SCDMA carriers, R4 carrier is mainly used for voice traffic, and
HSDPA carrier is mainly used for data traffic. Based on China Mobiles planning requirements,
every sites traffic load should not exceed 75%. As a result, each R4 carrier supports up to 203
voice users, and each HSDPA carrier can support up to 93 users. There are total 17,000
effective users in the trial area. When BBU pool is deployed, 160 carriers will be able to support
20,000 effective users. This means the C-RAN centralized deployment can save the BBU
capacity by roughly 25%, compared with traditional deployment method.
Similarly, the trial in Changsha also has used the co-current capacity to decide the total
capacity of the BBU pool.
The second part of the solution involves dynamic carrier allocation. In TD-SCDMA system, each
RRH/sector can support maximum 6 R4 and HSDPA carriers. In the idle situation, each
RRH/sector has only one R4 carrier and one HSDPA carrier. There are different carrier allocation
decision criteria whether more R4 and HSDPA carriers should be added. Whenever the existing
R4 carriers loading rate is above a threshold, there should be more R4 carriers allocated in this
site. For HSDPA carrier, similar rule applies. Where there is not enough load in multiple R4 or
HSDPA carrier, it is also possible to reduce the number of R4 and HSDPA carriers in one sector.
For GSM system similar rule also applies but the criteria is the utilization rate of each GSM
carrier.
The third portion of the solution involves RRH daisy chain and fiber failure protection
technologies. These technologies are derived from the distributed BBU-RRH deployment
method which usually uses point-to-point dark fiber connections. When BBU-RRHs are
separated by significant distance, it is important to consider the saving of fiber resource and
protection against unpredictable fiber failure caused by external factors. In TD-SCDMA, each
fiber link can handle up to 6.144Gpbs transmission, enough to support 15 TD-SCDMA carriers.
Thus, one pair of fiber is able to support one site with 3 sectors and maximum carrier of 15. In
the Zhuhai trial, each access ring has 9 sites and used 9 pair of fibers to support the 9 sites
connected to the ring.
On the other hand, GSM has far less baseband requirement due to its narrow band nature;
therefore it can support more capacity in daisy-chain configuration. There are commercial
products that can support 18 to 21 RRH daisy chained on one pair of dark fiber. We can
calculate the fiber resource required per access ring as following: usually, each access ring has
8~ 12 physical sites and each site has 3 sectors, and has 900M and 1800M dual bands. This
31
means, each access ring may has up to 16~24 logical sites, which is 48 to 72 sectors/RRH. To
connect all the RRH in daisy chain, we would need 4~5 pair of fibers in the ring.
Lastly, the field trial has also verified key technology for outdoor deployment, like power supply
for remote sites. In the Zhuhai Trial, there is no BTS equipment room in the 9 new sites. Thus
the traditional DC power supply is not available. External power booth is used instead. Existing
outdoor power solution met the need of network deployment: with sufficient operation
temperature range, -40+70, C-level anti-flash capacity and theft-proof solution to ensure
the safety of device without on-site attendance. GSM and TD-SCDMA remote site both can
apply this outdoor power solution.
Technical Performance
This section will outline the technical performance data from selected test cases in the trial,
starting with the dynamic carrier allocation procedure. The following figure illustrates the total
number of carriers allocated to one sector in a typical day on one site in Zhuhai trial. The blue
curve represents this sectors total carrier capacity, while the purple curve represents the actual
network load for this sector. It is clearly shown that the dynamic carrier allocation has adapted
effectively to dynamic load in network.
when the access fiber ring was cut accidently, the BBU-RRH
traffic will be automatically switched to another unaffected route in the ring. The switching
delay during the failure protection is comparable to normal cross-BTS or cross-MSC. Thus the
failure protection has very limited effects to network KPI.
In summary, C-RAN centralized deployment does not have negative effect on radio
performance. On the contrary, it may provide extra gains on radio performance. Moreover, RRH
daisy chain could reduce the dark fiber resource needs, while out-door units meet the power
requirement of out-door remote sites. Now dark fiber transportation solution has been well
verified, and other transmission technologies are in testing.
32
Economic analysis
The trial in Zhuhai city shows that, compared with traditional RAN deployment method, C-RAN
centralized deployment can reduce the TD-SCDMA networks CAPEX and OPEX significantly,
especially for new TD-SCDMA site which is not reusing existing GSM site. In the following figure,
it is shown that OPEX and CAPEX can be reduced by 53%, and 30% respectively for new cell
sites.
Construction Impact
The centralized deployment of C-RAN greatly simplifies the remote site selection and
construction requirements, construction time required for new base stations, which lead to
faster network deployment. Table 3 shows the comparison of the construction process between
traditional base station and C-RAN centralized approach in the China Mobiles TD-SCDMA
network deployment in Zhuhai City, Guangdong Province.
From figure 17, C-RAN showcases the advantage of deployment time. The savings are mainly
from site selection/purchasing, base station equipment room construction and transmission
system debug, etc.
33
site selection
Stringent,
flexible
Equipment room
Power supply
equal
Site Equipment
Installation needed
No requirement
transmission
Equipment install
Verification
Base
Station
equipment
Air
conditioning
Switching
Supply
Traditional
0.65 KW
2.0 KW
0.2 KW
0.2 KW
0.2 KW
3.45KW
C-RAN
0.55KW
0.2KW
0.10KW
0.85KW
Storage
Battery
Transmission
System
Total
Summary
C-RAN centralized commercial access network demonstrates several benefits including: 1)
simplified site selection and improve the speed of location selection negotiations; 2) reduced
base station construction and maintenance cost, improved network deployment efficiency; 3)
reduced supporting facilities of remote cell sites, led to construction cost reduction by 1/3 per
site.
In terms of network operation, C-RAN takes advantage of low cost, energy efficiency RRH.
Centralized BBU facilitates easy maintenance and flexible upgrade. The overall network
utilization can be improved due to virtualization technology and resource sharing which not only
increases
utilization
but
also
lowers
overall
power
consumption
thru
various
power
management schemes.
34
developed large scale Baseband Pool supporting more than thousands of carriers. The
innovation includes the IQ data routing switch method designed by CMRI, using existing
equipment. Several C-RAN partners have made breakthrough progress to expand the scale of
Baseband Pool beyond thousands of carriers.
distributed multilayer switch architecture, with high serviceability, low maintenance and flexible
capacity expansion. This section describes the key technology for large scale baseband pool
development -- IQ data routing switch, and its adaptive improvement for telecommunication
equipment. Finally, it briefly highlights the key technical characteristics of the equipment.
IQ Data Routing Switch Architecture
IQ data routing switch is the core unit of the large scale baseband pool. It is capable of
switching any RRH data to any baseband processing unit for data processing. This data switch
architecture is based on the Fat-Tree architecture of DCN technology. The advantages of this
architecture include:
-
switch node has the same number of switch ports, and maintains the same required
transmission bandwidth. Therefore reduces switch capability requirement for each node. There
is at least one connection between any lower processing node and other processing node. If
one connection is out of service, redundant connections can play a backup role, which results in
a highly fault tolerant networks. As shown in the following figure:
35
Current commercial BBU equipment primarily used stack of baseband processing units, plus a
backplane with switching capability. It switches the RRH baseband IQ data to a specified
baseband processing unit, thereby creating a pre-planned processing capability of baseband
pool.
The limitation of this approach is the amount of data flow from the interconnection
between any two equipments is limited by the capability of the backplane of single equipment.
So todays design can only support connection between 2 sets of equipment. Consequently
upgrading a single equipment capacity by adding more baseband process units will demand
higher switch capability of the backplanes. To combat this limitation, China Mobile Research
Institute proposed to apply the Fat-Tree structure into existing wireless BBU equipment.
Without significant changes to the existing equipment, the proposal adds a set of high layer
switch unit to form Fat-Tree Topology to gain higher switch and baseband pool processing
capacities. Similar to how the Computer network works, at this network structure, each
baseband processing Board, through the high layer network, can transfer its data to other
baseband board that is in lower utilization state.
boards in the baseband pool will increase redundancy, and achieve real-time protection, thus
improving the reliability of the equipment.
However, contrasting to the computer network, IQ data routing switch has additional
characteristics.
First of all, Baseband signals require real time processing, and bound by its frame structure of
GSM/TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE protocols. Each frame has strict timing requirements. IQ data routing
switch cannot send a data packet belonging to a single carrier, over different connections to the
receiver. Otherwise it will require the receiver to rearrange the received data packet, which will
generate additional delay. The End-to-end transmission cannot be routed multiple times,
which .causes delay and jitter at the received end. China Mobile Research Institute has
proposed a Pre-distribution Routing technology to solve this problem. Its principle is to preallocate resource before connection is established, making each switching node setting aside
adequate resources and identifying of the next routing port.
Secondly, IQ data transmission requires relatively large bandwidth, it is important to consider
transmission path load balancing, otherwise it could easily cause the route blockage during
overload. Therefore China Mobile Research institute has proposed the Load Balanced
technology. The principle is that: for a routing node receiving a data flow, the data flow with
the source address of Src, the object address of Dst, the flow (each data spread sent of is 1 or
multiple carriers) data numbered the Num, routing node finds the routing table based on Dst. If
the routing table includes multiple suitable next jumps, the routing node will generate a
random number according to (Src, Dst, Num), then determining the address of next Jump
based on the random number. This has resulted in path selection of randomization. With the
Path selection of randomization, even if the Src and Dst are same, the difference of the carrier
number (Num) will generate different path/route, so as to achieve the load balancing.
Distributed Architecture
In addition to IQ data routing, we need to consider implementation of resource management,
signal processing functions and so on, for a large scale baseband pool. China Mobile Research
Institute has introduced the Distribute Architecture. Use ZTE equipment as an example, a single
baseband processor BBU module can handle the Iub interface signaling and servicing
processing, based on the largest capacity in a network with 108 carriers. A distributed
framework can solve the problem of large scale processing, retain service processing unit for
each box. At the same time, a separate Ethernet switch handles dynamic resource management.
Each box has separate and independent Iub ports; it logically becomes independent network
elements of NodeB. In addition, one extra master network element manages entire resource of
36
the rack, and controls redistribution of individual physical resources. This approach is simple to
implement, adding a box means gaining one more independent NoteB network element,
without any impact to other network elements. Also, when a baseband processing unit fails, the
failed unit, under the master redistribution mechanism, can redistribute its original signaling
information to other box over the Ethernet.
37
5ms, while TD-LTE protocol requires every frame has to be completely processed within 1ms.
Typical IT operating system is not designed to meet telecom grade real time requirements,
therefore subframe scheduling delay, resource management are not typically guaranteed to
complete fewer than 1ms. In addition, IT platform generally lacks the stringent timing required
by base station. Lastly, traditional signal processing algorithm is typically designed to be
implemented on ASIC, FPGA and DSP. Therefore, many believe that IT server is not capable of
handling complex signal processing such those of LTE.
However, the C-RAN trial has so far proved that IT server can meet the aforementioned
challenges with technology innovations. First step is to expand the real time capability on IT
server to meet the subframe processing timing and accuracy demand. In addition, by adding
hard real time and synchronization on the CPRI/Ir interface card, we can separate the RRH
hard real time CPRI/Ir functions from the IT signal processing tasks which only require soft
real time.
Finally, significant effort had been spent to optimize LTE algorithm on general purpose processor,
fully utilizing every available instruction set and memory to the maximum advantages,
therefore significantly increases the CPU processing efficiency. We were able to implement 3GPP
release 8 TD-LTE physical layer entirely on software running on general purpose processor and
meeting all the timing and delay benchmarks. The TD-LTE implementation parameters are:
20Mhz bandwidth, 2x2 MIMO downlink, 1x2 SIMO uplink, 64QAM/15QAM/QPSK modulation,
Turbo decoder with adaptive early termination. Under peak throughput, every subframe was
being processed under 1ms TTI, meeting the most stringent HARQ processing latency
requirements in TD-LTE. As expected, GSM and TD-SCDMA processing met the timing
requirements with flying colors.
Based on trial results to date, we can conclude that CPU is capable to process baseband signal
processing work load and associated real time requirements. Cycle counts of certain modules
take up higher proportion of the overall processing time, such as turbo decoder, convolution
decoding, FFT processing etc. By introducing co-processing of such tasks, we can expect to
increase overall efficiency by 5 times or higher. In the not too distant future, general purpose
CPU implementing BBU functions, combining with DSN, will be the foundation of an open
platform that serves a large scale dynamic baseband pool, evolving into a virtualized, cloud
computing C-RAN solution.
38
7 Conclusions
With the arrival of the mobile Internet era, todays RAN architecture is facing more and more
challenges that the mobile operators need to solve: mobile data flow increase drastically caused
by the popularization of smart terminals, very hard to improve spectrum efficiency, lack of
flexibility to multi-standard, dynamic network load because of tides effect and expensive to
provide ever increasing internet service to end users. Mobile operators must consider the
evolution of the RAN to a high efficient and lost cost architecture.
C-RAN is a promising solution to the challenges mentioned above. By using new technologies,
we can change the network construction and deployment ways, fundamentally change the cost
structure of mobile operators, and provide more flexible and efficient services to end users.
With
the
distributed
RRH
and
centralized
BBU
architecture,
advanced
multipoint
39
8 Acknowledgement
We would like to thank IBM China Research Lab, Intel Cooperation and Institute of Computing
Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences for their valuable contribution to this white paper.
40
AIS
ASIC
ARPU
BBU
BS
Base Station
CAGR
CAPEX
Capital Expenditure
CBF
Coordinated Beam-Forming
CDN
CoMP
C-RAN
CSI
CT/CR
Cooperative Transmission/Reception
DPI
DSP
DSN
eNB
Evolved Node B
FEC
FTTX
Fiber To The X
FPGA
GGSN
GPP
GSM
HW/SW
Hardware/Software
ICI
Inter-cell Interference
IQ
In-phase/Quadrature-phase)
I/O
Input/Output
JP
Joint Processing
LTE
LTE-A
MAC
MIMO
MNC
OBRI
OFDM
OPEX
Operating Expenditure
41
OTN
O&M
P2P
Peer to Peer
PA
Power Amplifier
PHY
Physical Layer
Pon
QoS
Quality of Service
RAN
RF
Radio Frequency
RNC
RRH
RRM
SDR
SFP
SGSN
TCO
TDD
TD-SCDMA
TEM
TP
Transmission Point
UE
User Equipment
UL/DL
Uplink/Downlink
UMTS
UniPon
VNI
VoIP
Voice over IP
WCDMA
WDM
XENPAK
XFP
42
10 Reference
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Convergence, white paper from In-Stat, 2009.Multi standard
[2] Cisco Visual Networking Index, URL: www.cisco.com/web/go/vni
[3] Geza Szabo,Daniel Orincsay,Balazs, Peter Gero,Sandor Gyori,Tamas Borsos, Traffic
Analysis of Mobile Broadband Networks, Third Annual International Wireless Internet
Conference October 22-24, 2007, Austin, Texas, USA
[4] CPRI Specification V4.1,
Specification. 2009-02-18
Common
Public
Radio
Interface
(CPRI);
Interface
[5] F.-Joachim Westphal. Trends and evolution of transport networks. SL SI, IBU Telco, SSC
ENPS
[6] 3GPP, R1-093273, SRS feedback mechanism based CoMP schemes in TD-LTE-Advanced
[7] Q. H. Spencer, A. L. Swindlehurst and M.Haardt, Zero-forcing methods for downlink
spatial multiplexing in multiuser MIMO channels, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing,
vol. 52, pp. 461 471, Feb. 2004.
[8] L. U. Choi and R. D. Murch, A transmit preprocessing technique for multiuser mimo
systems using a decomposition approach, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 3, no. 1,
pp. 2024, Jan. 2004.
[9] Jun Zhang, Runhua Chen, J. G. Andrews and R. W. Heath, Coordinated multi-cell MIMO
systems with cellular block diagonalization, Proc.41st Asilomar Conference on Signals,
Systems and Computers (ACSSC 07), pp. 1669 1673, Nov. 2007.
[10] Rajesh Gadiyar, John Mangan, Using Intel Architecture for implementing SDR in Wireless
Basesations, SDRForum, SDR09.
[11] White Paper of Distributed Service Network. China Mobile Research Institute.
43
Contact:
CHEN Kuilin
DUAN Ran
Email:
chenkuilin@chinamobile.com
duanran@chinamobile.com
44