A cloud radio access network with power over fiber toward 5G networks: QoE-guaranteed design and operation

While the concept of Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RANs) presents a promising solution to provide required quality of service (QoS) for the future network environment, i.e., more than 10 Gbps capacity, less than 1 ms latency, and connectivity for numerous devices, it is still susceptible to quality of experience (QoE) problems. Until now, only a few researchers considered the design and operation of C-RANs based on QoE. In this article we describe our envisioned C-RAN based on passive optical networks (PONs) exploiting power over fiber (PoF), which can be installed with low installation cost and is capable of providing communication services without external power supply for remote radio head (RRH), and describe QoE requirement on the envisioned network. For all users in the envisioned network to satisfy their QoE, effective network design and operation approaches are then presented. Our proposed design and operation approaches demonstrate how to construct the envisioned network, i.e. the numbers of RRHs and optical line terminals (OLTs), and sleep scheduling of RRHs for an energy-efficient optical power transmission.