Residential power line is considered a cost-effective communication media for building a digital indoor distributed network thanks to its ubiquity in the indoor environment. This paper investigates a front-hauling system under the split centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, aiming to examine the feasibility of implementing common public radio interface (CPRI) over power line communication (PLC) channels. Particularly, we introduce a novel device called CPRI-PLC gateway (CPG) that provides a virtual CPRI link over the PLC channel to ensure high reliability and efficiency in delivering the CPRI hyper-frames (HFs) between the data unit (DU) and radio unit (RU). We examine the proposed CPRI over PLC system via extensive simulations in terms of the achievable throughput and reliability.Index Terms-Centralized radio access network (C-RAN), common public radio interface (CPRI), front-haul, hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ), impulsive noise detection & re-transmission (IND-Re), power line communication (PLC).
I. INTRODUCTIONI N 5G communication systems, the user mobile data traffic is expected to reach more than seven-fold over the user data traffic in 2017, where the expected average mobile network data rate is 28.5 Mbps by 2022 [1]. [2] considers that deployment of low-power small base stations (BSs) is the most effective solution to meet this demand. This is particularly critical in the case of indoor service provisioning, in which the antennas should be located as close to the users as possible for line-of-sight (LOS) transmissions.In [3], Huawei proposed the digital indoor distributed network (DIDN) as a promising indoor coverage solution in the evolution to 5G. The typical DIDN characteristics are met by the namely split C-RAN, which divides a conditional base station (BS) into three entities, i.e., central unit (CU), distributed unit (DU), and radio unit (RU) [4]. RUs, performing like active antennas, are distributed in each indoor chamber to Manuscript