QR Approximation for Fronthaul Compression in Uplink Massive MIMO

Massive MIMO's immense potential to expand the capacity of base stations also comes with the caveat of requiring tremendous processing power. This favours a centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture that concentrates the processing power at a common baseband unit (BBU) connected to multiple remote radio heads (RRH) via fronthaul links. The large bandwidths of 5G make the fronthaul data rate a major bottleneck. Since the number of active users in a massive MIMO system is much smaller than the number of antennas, we propose a dimension reduction scheme based on QR approximation for fronthaul data compression. Link level simulations show that the proposed method achieves more than 17A- compression while also improving the error performance of the system through denoising.