Interference Alleviation for Time-Reversal Cloud Radio Access Network

Abstract

Due to the unique spatial and temporal focusing effects, time-reversal (TR) communication can be utilized in the cloud radio access network, where it creates a tunneling effect such that the traffic load in the front-haul links can be alleviated in both downlink and uplink. Although the basic TR waveforms are simple to use, they cannot provide the optimal performance in some cases. While the cloud radio access network (C- RAN) is usually expected to serve massive wireless devices, the severe inter-user interference (IUI) might limit the performance of the system. In this paper, we propose to optimize both downlink and uplink transmissions so as to alleviate the interference. In the downlink transmission, optimal content-aware waveform design is proposed so that the baseband units (BBUs) are able to combine both the channel information and the symbol information to suppress the interference. In the uplink transmission, an optimal receiver design algorithm is proposed such that the BBUs can detect the symbols transmitted by the terminal devices (TDs) more accurately by leveraging the channel information. We study the BER performance of the proposed algorithm based on extensive measurements of the wireless channel in a real- world environment. Numerical results demonstrate the significant performance improvement over basic TR transmission techniques.