Flow Scheduling with Low Fronthaul Delay for NGFI in C-RAN

Abstract

Next generation fronthaul interface (NGFI) is a promising fronthaul (FH) interface for the future centralized radio access network (C-RAN), which is packet-based and supports statistical multiplexing via flow scheduling at the node in the FH network. However, FH delay may be increased by flow scheduling. Targeting to minimize the maximum FH delay, this paper investigates the optimized flow scheduling in NGFI. Due to the high complexity of optimal solution, an intuitive low rate scheduled first (LRSF) scheme is proposed to achieve the good performance with low complexity. The main idea is to schedule the flow of lower rate with higher priority, so that the maximum FH delay of packets in the flow with lower priority can be reduced. Simulation results show that the delay performance of LRSF approaches to the optimal one and outperforms existing schemes.