A Novel Front-hauling Architecture under Centralized Radio Access Network (C-RAN)

Residential power line is considered a cost-effective communication media for building a digital indoor distributed network thanks to its ubiquity in the indoor environment. This paper investigates a front-hauling system under the split centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, aiming to examine the feasibility of implementing common public radio interface (CPRI) over power line communication (PLC) channels. Particularly, we introduce a novel device called CPRI-PLC gateway (CPG) that provides a virtual CPRI link over the PLC channel to ensure high reliability and efficiency in delivering the CPRI hyper-frames (HFs) between the data unit (DU) and radio unit (RU). We examine the proposed CPRI over PLC system via extensive simulations in terms of the achievable throughput and reliability.