Near-lossless compression/decompression algorithms for digital data transmitted over fronthaul in C-RAN

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is not only a very important deployment solution for the future RAN but is also a core platform for network-centric advanced transmission techniques such as coordinated multi-point transmission and reception and the distributed antenna system. One of the main issues when implementing C-RAN at low cost and high efficiency is the need to reduce the implementation cost of the fronthaul and improve its usage efficiency. In order to achieve this, in this paper, near-lossless compression and decompression algorithms for digital data transported via fronthaul in C-RAN are proposed, where the compression is mainly achieved through the removal of various redundancies in wireless communication signals. Since the proposed algorithms significantly reduce the amount of data that should be transmitted via fronthaul while maintaining negligible in-band distortion in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM), we can actually reduce the number of transmission lines or enhance the utilization of them. In addition, they can be operated with a minimum compression ratio as well as a constant compression ratio; therefore, real-time processing and fronthaul data-muxing can be easily performed. Simulation results and comparisons have been carried out based on the 3rd generation partnership project long-term evolution system and the common public radio interface, which is a publicly available specification that is widely utilized to implement the fronthaul. Simulation results confirm that the proposed schemes can provide remarkable compression performance with a zero uncoded bit error rate and negligible signal distortion. Finally, the proposed schemes have various parameters that can be adjusted to meet given requirements such as latency, the compression ratio, EVM, complexity, and so on, and thus a smooth tradeoff between them can be achieved.