Performance Evaluation of Backhaul Network in Cloud Radio Access Networks

As network operators thrive to increase the speed and capacity of their mobile communication networks to cope with the rapidly increasing rate in mobile data, new revolutionary techniques have become a must to achieve these goals without increasing their power consumption. One of the solutions is to integrate the Cloud Computing paradigm into the current Radio Access Networks to make use of its numerous advantages and especially pooled resources. The main concept behind Cloud Radio Access Network is pooling the baseband processing units at a centralized location through decoupling the baseband processing units from the remote radio heads. This paper targets evaluating the performance gain achieved from C-RAN architecture by implementing an OMNET++ simulation model for the C-RAN and the traditional RAN. Four aspects were evaluated in our study: power consumption, delay, number of processing units and throughput. The results obtained shows that at intermediate traffic loads the C-RAN provides lower power consumptions rates and reduction in the number of required processing units.