A Flexible Research Testbed for C-RAN

This paper presents a laboratorial platform for the development and trial of C-RAN compliant features. As part of future mobile networks standardization, C-RAN is considered as an evolution of the current RAN, which inherent challenges represent an interesting topic of research among academic institutions and industry. The proposed testbed is intended to provide a cost-effective emulation of the high price and vendor-specific closed radio base station equipment such as BBU and RRH modules. Based on open FPGA platforms, it leads to a high level of flexibility according to user-defined configurations as well as it provides a high set of real-world deployments features, such as the optical CPRI interface, multi-mode and multi-band capabilities. Furthermore, due to its modularity it is targeted for a wide range of C-RAN applications and optimization scenarios such as CoMP, cloud processing and baseband signal compression.