Radio over Cloud (RoC): Cloud-Assisted Distributed Beamforming for Multi-Class Traffic

Cloud has yet to be applied to computationally intensive radio signal processing, due to closely coupled computing tasks resulting from interference. This paper presents a new cloud-assisted joint beamforming architecture, where computations are decoupled for individual wireless users and pipelined for cloud execution, using Difference of Convex (DC), l(1)-norm approximations, and dual decompositions. User-specific tasks are constructed and aligned with the cloud to leverage computation reuses and minimize overhead. The time-complexity is dramatically improved to support networks with tens to hundreds of base stations and users, without compromising the sum rate and quality-of-service. Further, the superiority of DC to the state-of-the-art Weighted Minimum Mean Square Error (WMMSE) in terms of convex relaxation is observed and discussed. Corroborated by simulations, the reason is revealed as WMMSE aggressively increases the data rate at interim stages, hence adversely interacting with l(1)-norm approximation and reducing the feasible solution regions at later stages.