Large system analysis of downlink C-RAN with phase noise and fronthaul compression

This paper studies the effect of phase noise and fronthaul compression on a downlink cloud radio access network (C-RAN), where several remote radio heads (RRHs) are coordinated to communicate with users by a baseband unit (BBU) on the cloud server. In the system, the baseband signals are precoded at BBU, and then compressed before being transmitted to RRHs through capacity-limited fronthaul links which results in the compressive quantization noise. We assume the regularized zero-forcing precoding is performed with an imperfect channel state information and a compression strategy is applied at BBU. The effect of phase noise arising from nonideal local oscillators both at RRHs and users is considered. We propose an approximate expression for the downlink ergodic sum-rate of considered C-RAN utilizing large dimensional random matrix theory in the large-system regime. From simulation results, the accuracy of the approximate expression is validated, and the effect of phase noise and fronthaul compression can be analyzed theoretically based on the approximate expression.