Space-time fronthaul compression of complex baseband uplink LTE signals

Abstract

In this paper, we propose space-time fronthaul compression of baseband uplink LTE signals for cellular networks, in which baseband units (BBUs) support remote radio heads (RRHs) through fronthaul links. In particular, we assume massive antenna arrays in which the number of antennas in a RRH is much larger than the number of active users. The proposed method consists of two phases: dimensionality reduction phase and individual quantization phase. The key idea of the first phase is to apply principal component analysis (PCA). It performs low-rank approximation of a matrix - composed of received signals - by exploiting the correlation of the received signals across space and time. In the second phase, our method individually quantizes the dimensionality-reduced signal by applying transform coding with bit allocation to reduce the number of quantization bits. An LTE link-level simulator provides numerical results which show that the method achieves up to 8 χ compression ratio for the uplink with 64 antennas and 4 active users, along with improvement in communication system performance as a result of denoising. © 2016 IEEE.