Performance Analysis and Evaluation of Cloud Radio Access Networks

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has been recognized as a promising paradigm for the emerging fifthgeneration wireless communication network. Unlike traditional coordinated multi-point (CoMP) technique aiming at cell edge users in long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) networks, CRANs support large-scale coordination (LSC) for the whole users owing to the pooling of baseband processing resources. However, the performance gap between C-RANs and CoMP-enabled LTEA networks has not been evaluated yet. In this paper, we discuss the LSC in C-RANs and traditional CoMP in LTE-A networks, considering the effects of the network density and imperfect channel state information. Then system level performances of C-RANs and CoMP-enabled LTE-A small cell networks are evaluated for a dense hotspot scenario. Results demonstrate that compared with the network without coordination, the CRAN improves the performance significantly with the increasing network density while the gain of the CoMP-enabled LTE-A network keeps nearly constant. Moreover, the C-RAN is more sensitive to the channel accuracy, which should be carefully considered for the implementation of C-RANs.