Radio and Transport Planning of Centralized Radio Architectures in 5G Indoor Scenarios

Abstract

Providing high capacity to the end users is one of the main challenges for the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks. The users’ habit to consume online contents indoor makes the outdoor-to-indoor capacity provisioning impractical, especially when the high-frequency bands proposed for 5G are employed. The centralized radio architecture (CRA) is an in-building solution, which relies on the centralization of baseband processing functions, fully or partly allowing for centralized cell management while providing signals directly inside the buildings. On the other hand, the massive deployment of CRAs in urban areas may yield to unacceptably high installation costs, due to the radio network equipment to be activated. To make CRAs appealing to mobile operators, we propose different deployment strategies to minimize the CRA deployment cost. We define the remote radio unit placement (RRUP) problem and formulate it as an integer linear program, obtaining optimal deployment solutions in small urban residential scenarios. We prove the RRUP problem to be NP-hard, requiring heuristic approaches to solve large problem instances. To this end, we propose an effective and scalable heuristic for minimizing the amount of radio equipment required to deploy CRAs in large urban areas.