Cost and energy efficient CRAN deployment for capacity enhancement in radio access networks

Traffic demand in Radio Access Networks (RANs) is rapidly increasing and forecast to grow exponentially in the next decade. The current network capacity will not be able to face such demands, given that the present technologies are approaching the theoretical communication limits. New strategies are necessary to increase the network capacity and address the increasing traffic demands. Cell cooperation through Coordinated Multipoint Processing (CoMP) techniques has emerged as a powerful solution to increase the network capacity. In order to implement CoMP, a centralized unit for coordination and joint processing is necessary. The Centralized Cloud RAN (CRAN) architecture is recently introduced which could suit the CoMP requirements, since it provides a centralized unit, the so called Digital Unit (DU) pool. The deployment of CRAN involves a considerable cost which must be taken into account. In this thesis a cost efficient CRAN deployment is proposed and the performance of CoMP in CRAN is investigated. To this end, a comparison with traditional Distributed RAN (DRAN) is carried out. This is achieved by carrying out a techno-economic study. A cost efficient CRAN deployment is proposed by solving an optimization problem, namely the DU pool placement problem. The concept of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is introduced, which is defined as the sum of build-out costs and operation and maintenance costs for a given period in time. The TCO is then used as the objective function to minimize when performing the pool placement. Furthermore, the TCO is computed for a DRAN scenario as well. By doing so, the TCOs of the two architectures can be compared. Moreover, the solution of the pool placement problem is used to define a network scenario to simulate CoMP. In this thesis Joint Transmission (JT) is chosen among the several CoMP techniques. A performance analysis is carried out in order to understand the benefits of JT.