A New Processing Approach for Reducing Computational Complexity in Cloud-RAN Mobile Networks

Cloud computing is considered as one of the key drivers for the next generation of mobile networks (e.g. 5G). This is combined with the dramatic expansion in mobile networks, involving millions (or even billions) of subscribers with a greater number of current and future mobile applications (e.g. IoT). Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) architecture has been proposed as a novel concept to gain the benefits of cloud computing as an efficient computing resource, to meet the requirements of future cellular networks. However, the computational complexity of obtaining the channel state information in the full-centralized C-RAN increases as the size of the network is scaled up, as a result of enlargement in channel information matrices. To tackle this problem of complexity and latency, MapReduce framework and fast matrix algorithms are proposed. This paper presents two levels of complexity reduction in the process of estimating the channel information in cellular networks. The results illustrate that complexity can be minimized from O(N³) to O((N/k)³), where N is the total number of RRHs and k is the number of RRHs per group, by dividing the processing of RRHs into parallel groups and harnessing the MapReduce parallel algorithm in order to process them. The second approach reduces the computation complexity from O((N/k)³) to O((N/k)^2.807) using the algorithms of fast matrix inversion. The reduction in complexity and latency leads to a significant improvement in both the estimation time and in the scalability of C-RAN networks.