Description
Date depot: 1 janvier 1900
Titre: Cloud-RAN and D2D in Next Generation Wireless Communication Systems
Directeur de thèse:
Navid NIKAEIN (Eurecom)
Domaine scientifique: Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication
Thématique CNRS : Non defini
Resumé:
How to do advanced cooperation and coordination among geographically separated base stattions and user equipments is the key to enable next generation communication system.
• Cloud RAN (C-RAN) : is one of the most promising technologies that will impact future 5G architecture and possibly re-shape existing mobile network environments. Unlike traditional RAN, C-RAN detaches the Baseband units (BBU) from the edge radio equipments (the eNodeB). The baseband processing for many eNB, now called Remote Radio Heads (RRH), is centralized into a single pool of shared, and dynamically allocated BBUs, offering energy and multiplexing gains. These BBU functions could be implemented on commodity hardware and performed on virtual machines, further benefiting from softwarization and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Finally, the centralization of BBU functions facilitates advanced coordinated multicell signal processing, which are often impractical in regular, distributed BS setups due to stringent synchronization constraints.
• Device-to-Device(D2D) : which enables devices to discover the presence of other devices in their vicinity and also allow the communication with them directly with minimum network infrastructure involvement. The D2D link leads to less power consumption, smaller interference and shorter delays and also expand the network coverage via relaying signalling between remote devices to cellular network coverage. Moreover, D2D is a key essential role in public safety communication in which devices provide local connectivity even in case radio infrastructure or backhaul link damage. Several reports and specifications on D2D proximity services, D2D communications has been provided by 3GPP and D2D is also recognized as one of the technology components of the evolving 5G architecture.
Our vision is to provide a unified framework in two directions:
1. Model cloud-RAN and D2D link in the network through appropriate abstraction following the software-define network principles
2. Develope more advanced cooperation and coordination methods and algorithms to improve the performance of cloud-RAN and D2D discovery and communication in different cases.
Main Objectives
Cloud-RAN
In recent years of the study of Cloud-RAN, two important obstacles are essential to be solved:
1. Limited Fronthaul (FH) link between RRH and BBU
2. Limited RRH/BBU computation capability
The first problem in the adoption is the excessive capacity and latency requirements on the FH link connecting an RRH with the BBU cloud. Several studies have worked on the compression on the fronthaul link; however, the requirement of fronthaul now is still beyond imagniation after considering
massive MIMO antennas, larger frequency bandwidth transmission and higher modulation and coding scheme which are target for higher spectral efficiency in next generation communication system. Rather than offloading all the BBU processing on the cloud, dividing the Physical RX and TX chain in different blocks, it is possible to keep a subset of these blocks in the RRH. This concept is also known as Flexible Centralization. By gradually placing more and more BBU processing at the edge of the network, the FH capacity requirement becomes smaller but with less opertunity of advanced interference avoidance schemes and higher RRH cost.
The second key obstacle is how to well-allocated jobs in the RRH and the cloud (BBU-pool) in the circumstance that the cloud may be composed of several CPU cores with different capability and virtualization environment whereas the RRH may be composed of light-weight CPU can only process simple work. Based on the Flexible Centralization concept, the dynamic job allocation is required for the overall Cloud-RAN network and also required in the BBU pool of C-RAN. Besides, separated allocation of the data pland and control plane job are needed to be considered in order to satisfy the hard HARQ timing constraint for both downlink and uplink in different cell-loading scenarios.
Last but not least, the most realistic problem we should considered in the cloud-RAN concept is to consider both the limited FH link and the limited RRH/BBU computation capability and take their interaction impact into account. Since these two roles will impact each other, for example the limited FH link will impact the available supported RRH number and also the job allocation method in the cloud-RAN and vice versa, our objective of cloud-RAN is jointly consider the limited-FH and limited RRH/BBU computation capability and provide an unified method or algorithm to make the cloud-RAN concept in applicable in this circumstance.
Device to device communication
Several studies and specifications have been started by 3GPP LTE standard with particular focus on public safety network use cases. From the view of the specification, the network infrastructure assistance is still required to well-organized a D2D link, to support user cooperation and also the rel
Doctorant.e: Chang Chia-Yu