Rateless Coded Multi-User Downlink Transmission in Cloud Radio Access Network

In this paper, we propose a rateless coded transmission scheme for the multi-user downlink of Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). In the network, multiple users are served by a cluster of remote radio heads (RRH), which are connected to the building baseband units (BBU) pool through the fronthaul links with limited capacity. In the proposed transmission scheme, the precoder and compressor at the BBU pool, and the decoding algorithm at the users are designed. To further improve the performance of the proposed transmission scheme, we investigate the joint optimization of the precoder and the degree profiles of the rateless codes implemented at the BBU pool to maximize the sum throughput of the network. Explicitly, the optimization problem is formulated according to the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function analysis on the decoding process at the users. We give simulation results on the BER and throughput performance achieved by the proposed rateless coded transmission scheme, which verify the effectiveness of the joint optimization on the degree profiles and the precoder.