SWAN: Base-band units placement over reconfigurable wireless front-hauls

Small-cells are rapidly emerging as the mobile operators' choice to provide additional capacity in current and future mobile networks. However, in order to fully deliver on their promises, small-cells need to address severe interference control and coordination challenges. By centralizing base-band processing in large high-volume computing infrastructures, Cloud-RAN can effectively enable advanced coordination features for dense small-cells deployments. Unfortunately, Cloud-RAN tight bandwidth and latency requirements have made optical fiber the most common solution for the links interconnecting remote radio heads (RRHs) with the base band units (BBUs), i.e. the fronthaul. Recent advances in microwave communications are making wireless fronthauls a viable option especially in dense urban environments where fiber fronthauls could be too rigid for accommodating highly dynamic traffic patterns. In this paper, we provide a novel formulation for the BBU Placement problem where BBU pools are placed at the edges of the network, possibly co-located with macro-cells, and a reconfigurable wireless fronthaul is used in order to provide RRHs with connectivity. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work to tackle the BBU placement problem over a reconfigurable substrate network with mmWave links. We also propose a BBU Placement heuristics, and we evaluate it using a numerical simulator.