Economical-energy-efficient resource allocation for cache-enabled cloud radio access networks

Taking advantage of both edge cache (EC) and coordinated processing, cache-enabled cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have shown good potential to become a solution for future wireless networks. With the demand that the network needs to be fast, green and affordable, it has become an issue both practical and challenging to design a resource allocation strategy that leads to a proper balance among throughput, energy consumption and the cost of the cache-enabled C-RAN system. In this article, the economical energy efficiency (E3) metric is adopted as a feasible way to comprehensively evaluate the impacts in these aspects. Based on the constraints of both remote radio heads (RRHs) association and fronthaul capacity, an E3 optimization problem with the resource allocation for cache-enabled C-RAN is formulated as a nonconvex objective function. An algorithm is devised to achieve the sub-optimal solution for the problem afterwards. Simulation results confirm that the proposed method can significantly enhance the E3 performance of the cache-enabled C-RAN system.