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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.
The following figure 1 shows the components of the power consumption of China Mobile. It
shows the majority of power consumption is from BS in the radio access network. Inside the BS,
only half of the power is used by the RAN equipment; while the other half is consumed by air
condition and other facilitate equipments.
Obviously, the best way to save energy and decrease carbon-dioxide emissions is to decrease
the number of BS. However, for traditional RAN, this will result in worse network coverage and
lower capacity. Therefore, operators are seeking new technologies to reduce energy
consumption without reducing the network coverage and capacity. Today, there are quite a
number of amendment technologies that helps reduce BS power consumption, such as the
software solutions which save power through turning off selected carriers on idle hours like
midnight, the green energy solutions which offer solar, wind and other renewable energy for
base stations power supply according to local natural conditions, and the energy-saving air
conditioning technology which combined with the local climate and environment characteristics,
reduce the energy consumption of the air conditioning equipment, etc. However, these
technologies are supplementary methods and cannot address the fundamental problems of
power consumption with the number of increasing BS.
In the long run, mobile operators must plan for energy efficiency from the radio access network
architecture planning. A change in infrastructure is the key to resolve the power consumption
challenge of radio access network. Centralized BS would reduce the number of BS equipment
rooms, reduce the A/C need, and use resource sharing mechanisms to improve the BS
utilization rate efficiency under dynamic network load.
Other Support
Equipment,
3%
Transmission,
15%
Management Major
office, 7% Equipment,
Air 51%
Channel, 6%
Cell site, 72% Conditioners,
46%
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.
OPEX in network operation and the maintenance stage play a significant part in the TCO.
Operational expenditure includes the expense of site rental, transmission network rental,
operation /maintenance and bills from the power supplier. Given a 7-year depreciation period of
BS equipment, as shown in Fig.4, an analysis of the TCO shows that OPEX accounts for over 60%
of the TCO, while the CAPEX only accounts for about 40% of the TCO. The OPEX is a key factor
that must be considered by operators in building the future RAN.
The most effective way to reduce TCO is to decrease the number of sites. This will bring down
the cost for the construction of the major equipment; and will minimize the expenditure on the
installation and rental of the equipment incurred by their occupied space. Fewer sites means
the corresponding cost of supplementary equipment will also be saved. This can significantly
decrease the operators CAPEX and OPEX, but results in poorer network coverage and user
experience in the traditional RAN. Therefore, a more cost-effective way must be found to
minimize the non-productive part of the TCO while simultaneously maintaining good network
coverage.
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.
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.
On the other hand, the revenue of mobile operators is not increasing at the same pace as the
network capacity they provide. Mobile operators voice volumes are steadily increasing and the
data volume grows quickly, but revenues are not and ARPUs are even falling in some case. In
order to face the slow growth in revenue, operators are forced to constantly hold down costs
notably operating costs. That means mobile operators must find a low cost, high-capacity
access network with novel techniques to meet the growth of mobile data traffic while keeping a
healthy, profitable growth.
Each Base Stations processing capability today can only be used by the active users in its cell
range, causing idle BS in some areas/times and oversubscribed BS in other areas. When
subscribers are moving to other areas, the Base Station just stays in idle with a large of its
processing power wasted. Because operators must provide 7x24 coverage, these idle Base
Stations consume almost the same level of energy as they do in busy hours. Even worse, the
Base Stations are often dimensioned to be able to handle a maximum number of active
subscribers in busy hours, thus they are designed to have much more capacity than the
average needed, which means that most of the processing capacity is wasted in non-busy time.
Sharing the processing and thus the power between different cell areas is a way to utilize these
BS more effectively.
The exponential growth of mobile broadband data puts pressure on operators existing packet
core elements such as SGSNs and GGSNs, increasing mobile Internet delivery cost and
challenging the flat-rate data service models. The majority of this traffic is either Internet
bound or sourced from the Internet. Catering to this exponential growth in mobile Internet
traffic by using traditional 3G deployment models, the older 3G platform is resulting in huge
Meanwhile it is interesting to understand how people are using todays mobile internet. A recent
research paper [3] published by one major TEM may give us a glimpse of the most popular
mobile applications. It is surprising to see that people are gradually using mobile internet just
like they use the fixed broadband network. Content services which include content delivered
through web and P2P are actually dominating the network traffic. Fig.7 is an example of
wireless traffic on a commercial 3G operator. Considering this usage pattern, do we have better
choice than just blindly spending billions of dollars to upgrade back-haul and the core network?
GPS
Base-
Core PA
Main band Digital Transmitter
net- &
Control process- IF /Receiver
work LNA
& Clock ing
BBU RRU
Based on these two different function splitting methods, there are two C-RAN architectures.
Both of them are composed of three main parts: first, the distributed radio units which can be
referred to as Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) plus antennas which are located at the remote site;
second, the high bandwidth low-latency optical transport network which connect the RRHs and
BBU pool; and third, the BBU composed of high-performance programmable processors and
real-time virtualization technology.
Virtual BS Pool
Fiber
RRH RRH
RRH
RRH
RRH RRH
RRH
Fiber or
Microwave
RRH/L1
RRH/L1 RRH/L1
RRH/L1
RRH/L1 RRH/L1
RRH/L1
The fully centralized C-RAN architecture, as shown in figure 9, has the advantages of easy
upgrading and network capacity expansion; it also has better capability for supporting multi-
standard operation, maximum resource sharing, and its more convenient towards support of
multi-cell collaborative signal processing. Its major disadvantage is the high bandwidth
requirement between the BBU and to carry the baseband I/Q signal. In the extreme case, a TD-
LTE 8 antenna with 20MHz bandwidth will need a 10Gpbs transmission rate.
The partial centralized C-RAN architecture, as shown in figure 10, has the advantage of
requiring much lower transmission bandwidth between BBU and RRH, by separating the
baseband processing from BBU and integrating it into RRH. Compared with the full centralized
one, the BBU-RRH connection only need to carry demodulated data, which is only 1/20~1/50 of
the original baseband I/Q sample data. However, it also has its own shortcomings. Because the
baseband processing is integrated into RRH, it has less flexibility in upgrading, and less
convenience for multi-cell collaborative signal processing.
With either one of these C-RAN architectures, mobile operators can quickly deploy and make
upgrades to their network. The operator only needs to install new RRHs and connect them to
the BBU pool to expand the network coverage or split the cell to improve capacity. If the
network load grows, the operator only needs to upgrade the BBU pools HW to accommodate
the increased processing capacity. Moreover, the fully centralized solution, in combination with
open platform and general purpose processors, will provide an easy way to develop and deploy
software defined radio (SDR) which enables upgrading of air interface standards by software
only, and makes it easier to upgrade RAN and support multi-standard operation.
Different from traditional distributed BS architecture, C-RAN breaks up the static relationship
between RRHs and BBUs. Each RRH does not belong to any specific physical BBU. The radio
signals from /to a particular RRH can be processed by a virtual BS, which is part of the
processing capacity allocated from the physical BBU pool by the real-time virtualization
technology. The adoption of virtualization technology will maximize the flexibility in the C-RAN
system.
To support the above Cooperative Multi-Point Joint processing algorithms, both end-user data
and UL/DL channel information needs to be shared among virtual BSs. The interface between
virtual BSs to carry this information should support high bandwidth and low latency to ensure
real time cooperative processing. The information exchanged in this interface includes one or
more of the following types: end-user data package, UE channel feedback information, and
virtual BSs scheduling information. Therefore, the design of this interface must meet the real-
time joint processing requirement with low backhaul transportation delay and overhead.
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.
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
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.
In view of the above LTE/LTE-A BBU-RRH wireless signal transmission bandwidth problems,
several data compression techniques that can reduce the burden on the OBRI interface are
being investigated to deal with the inevitable bandwidth issue, including time domain
schemes (e.g. reducing signal sampling, non-linear quantization, and IQ data compression)
as well as frequency domain schemes (e.g. sub-carrier compression).
For LTE system with 20MHz bandwidth, the BBU uses 2048 FFT / IFFT but the effective
number of subcarriers is only 1,200, so if the FFT / IFFT is implemented in the RRH, then
the Ir interface between BBU and the RRH only has to transmit effective data subcarriers,
such that the Ir interface load can be reduced about 40%, However, frequency domain
compression leads to an increase in IQ mapping complexity, which would increase the
interface logic design and processing complexity. Meanwhile, the RRH needs to process
Table 2. Comparison of Pros and Cons for Various Data Compression Techniques
Bandwidth
Compression Pros Cons
Schemes
Low complexity; Severe performance loss.
Reducing signal Efficient compression to 66.7%;
sampling Less impacts on protocols.
As mentioned above, BBU-RRH wireless signal connection supporting LTE and LTE-Advance
creates new challenges to optical transmission network rates and cost. The rapid
development of the optical transmission technology provides more economic solutions to
solve the problem. A single fiber capacity of current commercial WDM system can be up to
3.2 T.10 Gpbs optical transmission technology applies generally and become fundamental
40 G system is mature and gradually being commercialized, 100 G technology is still not
mature and costs too much, there is still 2-3 years until the telecommunication
commercial level, but along with coherent technical breakthroughs, promoting of
standardization has already become a now advantage. 10GE standardization and
industrialization will 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.
Although BBU-RRH direct transmission under C-RAN framework does not provide a ring
network protection function like traditional SDH/PTN, the CPRI/Ir/OBRI interface rate
standards provide a similar ring network protection function, and are supported by
manufacturers. At the same time, in order to avoid having every RRH fully occupy two
optical fibers on a physically routed pair the RRHs can be connected to each in a cascaded
manner according to the CPRI/Ir/OBRI interface specification. This permits two different
routing trunk cables to form a ring and be connected to the same BBU, as shown in Figure
10. As long as the CPRI/Ir/OBRI interface rate is high enough, the BBU-RRH ring network
protection technology can save the use of many optical fibers and ensure a short round trip
delay. Taking a TD-SCDMA system for example, a 6.144 Gpbs CPRI/Ir/OBRI link can
support 15 TD-SCDMA carriers of 8-antenna RRH and a typical TD-SCDMA macro station
with 3 sectors, 5/5/5 configuration at most. The IQ data of a RRH with three sectors
connected to the same BBU machine through two different physical routing backbone
optical cables. When a trunk cable fails, three RRHs will connect to the BBU through
another trunk cable under less than 40ms protection rotated time to guarantee that all
business does not interrupt. For lower-rate GSM system, it is even simpler to connect six or
more RRHs through such a CPRI/Ir/OBRI annular link and achieve the same functions.
However, according to LTE/LTE-A system with higher wireless signal transmission rate, it is
necessary to introduce WDM technology to realize a similar loop protection function.
Radio remote
head
Trun
kc able
2
Optical
switching box
Transmission ring
In order to meet the high bandwidth transmission between RRH and BBU, operators can
use different solutions based on their current transmission network resources. In China
Mobile, the current backhaul is mainly an optical transport network with three layers of
transmission network: the core transmission layer, the convergence transmission layer and
the access transmission layer. All the layers are using ring topology to provide fail safe
protection. The optical resources of different layers are similar to the following: at the core
transmission layer, each optical route has 144 to 576 fibers; at the convergence
transmission layer, each route has 96-144 fibers; while at the access transmission layer,
each route has 24-48 fibers. If the Baseband pool is located in the transmission
convergence equipment room, the optical fiber resource to and from the equipment room
determines the coverage of the baseband pool.
According to the resourcing of the optical transmission network, especially the fiber
resource in the access transmission network, there are four different solutions to carry
CPRI/Ir/OBRI over it: 1. Dark fiber; 2. WDM/OTN; 3. Unified Fixed and Mobile access like
UniPON; 4. Passive WDM. These solutions have different advantages and disadvantages,
and they are each suitable for different deployment scenarios. From the trials conducted,
for a BBU pool with less than 10 macro BSs, it is preferred to use a dark fiber solution while
other solutions still need more field tests and verification, because they may introduce new
transmission devices and associated O&M issues.
The first solution is Dark fiber. It is suitable when there is plenty of fiber resource. It is easy
to deploy if there are a lot spare fiber resources. The benefits of this solution are: fast
deployment and low cost because no additional optical transport network equipment is
needed. The concerns of this solution are: it consumes significant fiber resource, thus the
network extensibility will be a challenge; new protection mechanisms are required in case
of fiber failure; and it is hard to implement O&M, therefore it will introduce some difficulties
for optical network O&M. However, there are feasible solutions to address such challenges.
For fiber resources, if there is already a channel route available, it is fairly inexpensive to
add new fiber cables or upgrade existing fibers. To address fiber failure protection, there
are CPRI/Ir/OBRI compliant products available now that have the 1+1 backup or ring
topology protection features. If deployed with physical ring topology that provides
alternative fiber route, it will be able to provide similar recoverability capability as SDH/PTN.
For the O&M of the fiber in the access ring, we are considering introducing new O&M
capabilities 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
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.
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
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.
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).
In this section, the performance of the JP scheme with intra-cell collaboration, and performance
with inter-cell collaboration in C-RAN architecture are evaluated in a TDD system. We assume
that full DL channel state information (CSI) can be obtained ideally at the eNB side. The
downlink throughput and spectrum efficiency results with different schemes in both 2 antenna
and 8 antenna configuration are shown in Fig.15. Detailed simulation parameters can be found
in [6-9].
4
6.58 0.266
5.466.15 0.1 0.078
0.227
0.183
2 0.056
2.813.01 2.54 0.101 0.098
1.9 2.47 0.047
0 0
2Tx (X)/2Rx 8Tx(XXXX)/2Rx 2Tx (X)/2Rx 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.
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.
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.
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 TD-
SCDMA). 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.
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 (single-
instruction 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
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.
(CPUs in 50-65 watt power envelopes used as basis for comparison in graph)
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.
Virtualization is a term that refers to the abstraction of computer resources. It hides the
physical characteristics of a computing platform from users, instead showing another abstract
computing platform. If such a concept can be utilized in a base station system, the operator
can dynamically allocate processing resources within a centralized baseband pool to different
virtualized base stations and different air interface standards. This allows the operator to
efficiently support the variety of air interfaces, and adjust to the tide effects in different areas
and fluctuating demands. At the same time, the common hardware platform will provide cost
effectiveness to manage, maintain, expand and upgrade the base station. Therefore, we believe
C
C A
A M
M P
P
Accelerator
(CODEC, cryto, etc.)
resource pool
Processors BS of standard 3
C
C A
A M
M P
P
Control & Manage
(O&M processing)
Processors resource pool
All the adjustments will be done by software only. With this mechanism, the base stations of
different standards can be easily built up through resource reconfigure in software. Also,
cooperative MIMO can get the required processing resources dynamically. In addition, the
processing resources can be assigned in a global view, thus the resource utilization can be
improved significantly.
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:
DSN can replace traditional carrier-class equipment with a general purpose server, and DSN
introduces virtualization technology, the DSN nodes are encapsulated in VM(Virtual Machine),
through VM live migration, when the traffic goes down, multi DSN nodes can aggregate to a
few physical servers, and other servers can be turned off, thus implementing energy
conservation and emission reduction.
Distributed Service
Network
DSN element
C-RAN element
BBU pool
BBU pool
In a platform layer, DSN and C-RAN both encapsulate their network elements through
virtualization technology on general servers, so, it is possible to run DSN and C-RAN on the
same virtualized platform. But how to implement the resource management including the
dimension of time and the dimension of physical resource is the key issue in the research of
platform unification for DSN and C-RAN.
The centralized BS has a high bandwidth, low latency switch matrix and corresponding protocol
to support the inter-connection of carrier processing units among multiple BBUs in order to
constitute a large-scale baseband pool. The signals from distributed RRH can be switched to
any BBU inside the centralized baseband pool. Thus, the centralized baseband pool can realize
carrier load balance to avoid some BBUs overloaded while some BBUs idle, and realize fault-
tolerance to avoid that the fault of single BBU affect the overall functions and coverage of the
wireless network. The above technologies can improve the usage efficiency of devices, reduce
power consumption and improve system reliability.
Meanwhile, with multiple RRHs attached to the centralized BBU pool, it is easier to implement
coordinated beamforming (CBF) and cooperative multipoint processing (CoMP) in this platform.
Multiple BBUs can coordinate with each other to share the scheduling information, channel
status and user data efficiently to improve the system capacity as well as reduce interferences
in system.
The centralized baseband pool consisted of large-scale BBUs by a high bandwidth, low latency
network, combined with some system software, can constitute a large real time baseband
cloud, just like the cloud computing environment in IT industry. The difference is that the
baseband processing tasks are real-time computing tasks in a real time baseband pool.
Overall situation
The first trial in Zhuhai City only took 3 months to complete. The commercial trial has 18 TD-
SCDMA 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 unique features, for example, it could support
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. .
Traditionally, network planning must support the peak traffic load at each individual site, which
is usually 10 times higher than the down time This results in a very low average utilization rate
of the BTS devices. It also introduces difficulties in network planning, construction and
optimization. It is suitable to adopt baseband pool with dynamic carrier allocation. In the trial
field, there will be 9 sites co-located with existing GSM site, while another 9 sites is new. All
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
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.
We also collected KPI of radio performance for both dynamic carrier allocation and static carrier
allocation. We noted no KPI difference.
In the Changsha trial, the C-RAN centralized deployment has shown better radio performance
and improved user experience, due to the introduction of co-located multi-RRH per site
technology. With this technology, multiple RRH transmit and receive signals for the same cell,
just like fiber repeat does but provide additional receive combination gain. Multiple radio
performance is improved, include uplink receive quality improved by 2%~3%, drop call rate
was reduced and nearly eliminated in some sites. In addition, since inter-site handover has
become an internal procedure in one BBU pool, the handover delay has been reduced. Finally,
the fiber protection was in place 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.
On OPEX, the savings are mainly come from A/C power consumption, site rental fee, regular
on-site maintenance visit , and reduced human resource on repair and upgrade. The key factor
is C-RAN has only RRH in remote site and no BTS equipment room, the site rental fee is much
lower, and O&M cost is also lower. This is an important saving, as the site rental fee is a
significant portion of the Zhuhai system TCO.
On CAPEX consideration, the savings are mainly from: no new BTS room, reduced transmission
devices on each remote site, and eliminating of various supporting devices in remote site. In
addition, the adaption of BBU pool can reduce the BTS configuration and potentially lower the
CAPEX on RAN.
In GSM trial, similar CAPEX/OPEX savings have been observed. However, it is very clear that
the savings achieved in these two cases are different, due to the different fiber resources,
different deployment scenarios in different city.
All-in-all, the economic analysis has shown the benefits in different areas. It is able to reduce
RANs O&M. however, it may be important to take account of each individual case to better
calculate the saving of CAPEX and OPEX. In addition, RRH requires much less and power, it is
easier to find new site, and easier to move to different place, which largely reduces the risk of
cell sites being forced to relocate due to regulations or neighborhood complaints, and the cost
and service disruptions associated with these.
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.
Equipment room Site rental and construction No site construction for RRH
Equipment install Radio system and BBU RRH and centralized BBU
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.
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:
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 pre-
allocate resource before connection is established, making each switching node setting aside
adequate resources and identifying of the next routing port.
Distributed Architecture
The following sections will describe hardware and software architecture of the prototype.
As shown below, the PCI Express interface is connected to CPRI/ir interface converter, which
then carries GSM/TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE signals to commercial RRHs. IQ samples of all three
standards are processed by the commercial server in real time.
The C-RAN proof of concept focuses on baseband processing feasibility on IT server, therefore,
the software develop does not cover any core network functions. The baseband processing
software is developed on Linux, and has implemented Layer 1, 2 and 3 on GSM and TD-SCDMA,
and Layer 1 processing on TD-LTE, with plan to add MAC scheduling in the near future. As a
result, the system currently only supports single UE. In the future, the TD-LTE system will
support MAC, L2, L3, LTE-A features like CoMP, and completes interoperability with commercial
devices.
Signal processing carries stringent real time requirements which pose challenges to the IT
servers. GSM protocol requires each frame being processed within 40ms; TD-SCDMA frame is
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.
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
transmission/reception technology, SDR with multi-standard support, virtualization technology
on general purpose processor, more efficient way of dealing with the tides effect and service on
the edge of the RAN, C-RAN will be able to provide todays mobile operator with a competitive
infrastructure to keep profitable growth in the dynamic market environment.
Wed like to invite all the mobile operators, the telecom equipment vendors, the traditional IT
system vendors, and industry/academic research institutes who are concerned on the future
evolution of the RAN to devote their intelligence and resources in the research of C-RAN to
make it a reality.