“…Additionally, the two fronthauling strategies-the soft-and hard-transfer schemes-are compared in terms of EE.Entropy 2019, 21, 860 2 of 23 delivery phase for a fixed pre-fetching strategy and leave the joint design of co-operative caching and delivery strategies as an interesting future research direction.All of the techniques discussed above, such as C-RAN and edge caching, come at the cost of increased energy consumption [30,31], which causes increases both in the resulting carbon footprint and system costs. In order to address this issue, it is important to design systems by adopting energy efficiency (EE), instead of spectral efficiency, as the performance metric (as in, e.g., [28,[30][31][32][33][34]). The energy-efficient design of C-RAN systems with wired fronthaul links has been addressed in [31,34], and [28] extended such design to the case with edge caching and imperfect channel state information (CSI).…”