Remote Radio Head Selection for Power Saving in Cloud Radio Access Networks

Abstract

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is considered as a cost- and energy-efficient architecture to meet the ever-increasing mobile data traffic, where baseband processing is decoupled from the remote radio head (RRH) and conducted in a centralized baseband unit (BBU) pool. Though C-RAN enables efficient resource allocation and reduces network operation cost, the optical transport network power consumption between the RRHs and the BBU pool is usually enormous. In this paper, we focus on the minimization of the total power consumption by jointly considering the transport network power and the transmission power of the RRHs. We formulate a general RRH selection task that falls into the form of capacitated facility location problem (CFLP) and propose an efficient local search algorithm to address it. Numerical results validate that our proposal can significantly reduce the total power consumption of the C-RAN.