User-Association and Resource-Allocation in a C-RAN-Based VWN

Although user association and dynamic resource allocation are the prime requirements in a VWN, the practical realization of these algorithms require coordination among BSs in order to obtain the knowledge about the channel conditions of users in all slices. To that end, C-RAN has been proposed to facilitate the collaboration among BSs by shifting the baseband processing of all BSs into the cloud. In this chapter, we address the issue of user association and resource allocation in a C-RAN-based VWN. Specifically, we formulate a resource allocation problem that jointly associates users to RRHs/BBUs and allocates the resources (power and antenna) in order to maximize the total sum-rate of the system. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in both the imperfect and perfect CSI scenarios.