Time-Reversal Tunneling Effects for Cloud Radio Access Network

Abstract

The explosion of today’s wireless traffic requires operators to deploy more access points (APs) and design efficient collaboration mechanism to alleviate the interference among them. However, the collaborative techniques cannot work efficiently due to the high latency and low bandwidth interface between the APs in traditional networks. To address this challenge, cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is proposed, where a pool of base band units (BBUs) are connected to the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) via high bandwidth and low latency links (i.e., the front-haul) and are responsible for all the baseband processing. But the limited front-haul link capacity may prevent the C-RAN from fully utilizing the benefits made possible by the centralized baseband processing. As a result, the front-haul link capacity becomes a bottleneck. To address this challenge, in this work, we propose using the time-reversal (TR)-based communication as the air interface in C-RAN. Due to the unique spatial and temporal focusing effects of TR-based communications, multiple terminal devices (TDs) are naturally separated by their location-specific signatures. Such a property allows signals to be combined to deliver without demanding more bandwidth. Therefore, the TR-based communication in essence creates a “tunneling” effect such that the baseband signals for all the TDs can be efficiently combined and transmitted in the front-haul. We study the performance of the proposed C-RAN architecture in terms of spectral efficiency and front-haul rate, based on extensive measurements of the wireless channel in a real-world environment. It is shown that with nearly the same amount of traffic load in the front-haul, more information can be transmitted when there are more TDs. The proposed TR tunneling effect can help deliver more information in the C-RAN and alleviate the burden of the front-haul caused by network densification.