Investigation of cell association techniques in uplink cloud radio access networks

Cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been proposed as promising solutions to increase both the spectrum and energy-efficiency performances in the fifth generation wireless communication systems. Many published works have discussed the concrete implementation technology to justify the huge development potential of C-RAN. However, few litterateurs focused on characterising the cell association in the uplink. In this paper, we study the cell association techniques in uplink C-RAN systems. Three received power based cell association techniques, namely the single best, N-best and N-th best, are presented and analysed. To characterise the random deployment of remote radio heads (RRHs) with multiple antenna configuration, stochastic geometry is used to evaluate the proposals' ergodic capacity, and the corresponding closed-form expressions are derived. For the received power based cell association techniques, both analytical and simulation results demonstrate that the ergodic capacity gain from an increase in RRH density is larger than that of increasing the number of antennas per RRH. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.