Rateless Coded Uplink Transmission Design for Multi-User C-RAN

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a promising technology for the Internet of Things (IoT). In C-RAN, the remote radio head (RRH) and baseband unit (BBU) in the conventional base station are separated, and each BBU is backward centralized into a virtual BBU pool. In this paper, we consider the uplink transmission for the two-user C-RAN with two RRHs under a block fading channel. A novel rateless coded transmission scheme is designed. During each transmission round, each user keeps transmitting to the RRHs using Raptor code until the BBU pool feeds back an acknowledgement (ACK). With the proposed scheme, each user does not require the instant channel state information, which greatly reduces the system overhead. We also design the quantizer at the RRHs and the iterative multi-user detector and decoder at the BBU pool, based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. For the Raptor code applied at each user, we optimize the corresponding output node degree profile, based on extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) analysis for the decoding process at the BBU pool. The resulted degree profiles are optimal in an average sense under all possible channel states. The simulation results show that the rateless coded transmission scheme with the optimized degree profiles outperforms the benchmark degree profile in both bit error rate and average system throughput. Moreover, the achieved performance is close to the theoretical limit.