All-in-one BTS

One major alternative solution that is addressing similar challenges of RAN, is the small size, all-in-one outdoor BTS. Thanks to the achievements in the semiconductor industry, all the functionality of a BTS, including RF, baseband processing, MAC processing and package level processing, can now be implemented in a volume of <50 liters. This makes the system small and weatherproof, reduces the difficulty of BTS site choice and construction, eliminates the air conditioning requirement, and thus reduces operational costs.

However, because each BTS is still working on its own, it cannot readily make use of the collaboration algorithms to reduce the interference between neighboring BTSs. It is also relatively hard to upgrade or repair because the all-in-one BTS units are usually mounted near the antenna. More processing units in less-protected environments also implies a higher failure rate compared to C-RAN, which only has the RRU deployed outdoors.

The advantage of Cloud RAN lies in its ability to implement LTE-Advanced features such as Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) with very low latency between multiple radio heads. However, the economic benefit of improvements such as CoMP can be negated by the higher backhaul costs for some operators.

Small cell

The main competition between small cell and C-RAN occurs in two deployment scenarios: outdoor hotspot coverage and indoor coverage.

Academic research and publications

As one of the promising evolution paths for future cellular network architecture, C-RAN has attracted high academic research interest. Meanwhile, because the native support of cooperative radio capability built into the C-RAN architecture, it also enables many advanced algorithms that were hard to implement in cellular networks, including Cooperative Multi-Point Transmission/Receiving, Network Coding, etc.

In October 2011, 27 was hosted in Germany, when China Mobile was invited to give a C-RAN presentation.

In August 2012, was hosted in Kunming, China.

CRC Press published a book, "Green Communications: Theoretical Fundamentals, Algorithms and Applications", and has as its 11th chapter: "C-RAN: A Green RAN Framework".

In December 2012, an IEEE GlobalCom 2012 conference, , was hosted in California, USA.

The European Committee Frame Project 7 has sponsors and is currently addressing many problems related to cellular network architecture evolution. Many of these projects have taken C-RAN as one of the future cellular network architectures, like the Mobile Cloud Network project.

References

External links

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