On Fronthaul Compression and Transmission Strategies for Utility Maximization in C-RAN

Utility maximization is a fundamental problem in cellular network optimization. This paper considers joint optimization of data compression and downlink transmission strategies in a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with finite fronthaul capacity. Our aim is to maximize the system utility with given quality of service (QoS) requirements for the users in such a network. We propose to exploit the optimality conditions and design a low-complexity iterative algorithm to obtain local optimal solutions. Compared with standard interior-point algorithms, simulations show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the processing time to as low as 1/625 while achieving the same final results. Comparisons with other transmission strategies are performed using numerical simulations.