Energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency in cooperative cloud radio access network

The use of cooperative transmission in combination with the cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is expected to offer the much sought after relief to address the explosive growth in data traffic and provide a reduction in the energy consumption. In this paper, the effect of cooperative transmission on network-level achievable data rate along with energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE) for downlink C-RAN architecture is studied. Extensive analysis using the stochastic geometry framework verifies the superiority of cooperative transmission in C-RAN architecture where cooperation provides up to twofold improvement in SE and a good increase in EE. Moreover, optimization is applied to find the optimal remote radio head density that maximizes the EE.