Energy-Efficient Joint Design of Fronthaul and Edge Links for Cache-Aided C-RAN Systems with Wireless Fronthaul

Abstract

This work addresses the joint design of fronthaul and edge links for a cache-aided cloud radio access network (C-RAN) system with a wireless fronthaul link. Motivated by the fact that existing techniques, such as C-RAN and edge caching, come at the cost of increased energy consumption, an energy efficiency (EE) metric is defined and adopted as the performance metric for optimization. As the fronthaul links can be used to transfer quantized and precoded baseband signals or hard information of uncached files, both soft- and hard-transfer fronthauling strategies are considered. Extensive numerical results validate the impact of edge caching, as well as the advantages of the energy-efficient design over the spectrally-efficient scheme. Additionally, the two fronthauling strategies—the soft- and hard-transfer schemes—are compared in terms of EE.

A Review on Green Caching Strategies for Next Generation Communication Networks

“…These cloudlets cached offloading-data and executed user tasks to reduce energy consumption. The authors in [121] designed communication links for both edge and fronthaul connections to achieve energy savings in a C-RAN.…”

“…Energy efficiency is recognized as a prime indicator of 5G networking systems [40], [48], [121], [131], [142], [154], [159]. It denotes the achieved data rate over per unit energy consumption.…”

“…Spectral efficiency (SE) is the amount of data rate that can be achieved utilizing per unit bandwidth [115], [121], [139], [140]. A higher SE is achieved when more users are served by the network.…”

“…Area power consumption [115], [139] Energy savings [2], [36], [42], [44], [114], [116], [117], [124], [141], [219] On-grid energy consumption [14], [24], [45], [208], [215], [216] Energy efficiency [29], [40], [43], [48], [121], [123], [129], [131], [135], [140], [142], [148], [154], [159], [163], [164], [178], [190] Economical energy efficiency [125] BS transmit power [146], [162], [191] Caching related metrics.…”

An Adaptive Compression Technique for Efficient Video Reconstruction in Future Generation Wireless Network

“…16 which features higher frequencies and many antennas, has been stressed with positive results to fulfill the aforementioned demand for supplying video streaming applications [9]. Usually, the CRAN consists of a BBU and RRH which communicate with the fronthaul link [10][11]. The baseband unit are usually residing in the data centers, from where the computing resources can be shared which will also further help in reducing the operational-cost and resources usage.…”