The explosive growth of wireless traffic requires revolutionary wireless communication techniques. The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is a solution to leverage the spatial multiplexing gain by utilizing a number of antennas distributed in a certain area. However, in most of the current literature, due to the limited front-haul capacity, each remote radio head (RRH) can use only a single antenna, and thus the total number of antennas can be utilized are limited. In this work, we propose a distributed baseband signal compressive quantization scheme for the uplink of a multi-antenna C-RAN where each RRH uses multiple antennas. At each RRH, the baseband signals of multiple time instants are embedded into a vector with low dimension using delay-and-add so that more bits can be allocated to each value, and the quantization noise power caused by the front-haul link capacity deficit is reduced. The delay-and-add operation is low complexity that can be realized using basic buffering and adding, and it does not require channel information in the RRHs. Therefore, the low deployment cost feature of C-RAN is preserved. As a result, a large number of antennas can be utilized by deploying a lot of multi-antenna RRHs, which provide rich spatial diversity that assists the detection which happens in the baseband units. In the symbol detection phase, the corresponding weight vectors are designed to detect the symbols from the compressive quantized baseband signal. A parallel interference cancellation algorithm is proposed to further improve the accuracy of the symbol detection. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme is efficient in tackling the front-haul capacity challenge. We also apply the proposed scheme to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based multi-antenna C-RAN, where we find that the system can utilize larger bandwidth with limited front-haul capacity. It facilitates the deployment of C-RAN based on both 4G and 5G wireless communications.

Due to the unique spatial and temporal focusing effects, time-reversal (TR) communication can be utilized in the cloud radio access network (C-RAN), where it creates “tunneling effects” such that the traffic load in the front-haul links can be alleviated in both downlink and uplink. Although the basic TR waveforms are simple to use, and they cannot provide the optimal performance in some cases. Since the C-RAN is usually expected to serve massive wireless devices, the severe inter-user interference will limit the performance of the system, especially in the high signal-to-noise ratio region where the interference power dominates the noise power. In this paper, we propose to optimize both downlink and uplink transmissions in the TR-based C-RAN so as to alleviate the interference. In the downlink transmission, an optimal content-aware waveform design is proposed, so that the baseband units (BBUs) are able to combine both the channel information and the content information to suppress the interference. In the uplink transmission, an optimal receiver design algorithm is proposed, such that the BBUs can detect the symbols transmitted by the terminal devices more accurately by leveraging the channel information. We study the bit error rate performance of the proposed algorithms based on extensive measurements of the wireless channel in a real-world environment. Numerical results demonstrate the significant performance improvement over the basic TR transmission techniques and the traditional waveform design techniques.

Due to the unique spatial and temporal focusing effects, time-reversal (TR) communication can be utilized in the cloud radio access network, where it creates a tunneling effect such that the traffic load in the front-haul links can be alleviated in both downlink and uplink. Although the basic TR waveforms are simple to use, they cannot provide the optimal performance in some cases. While the cloud radio access network (C- RAN) is usually expected to serve massive wireless devices, the severe inter-user interference (IUI) might limit the performance of the system. In this paper, we propose to optimize both downlink and uplink transmissions so as to alleviate the interference. In the downlink transmission, optimal content-aware waveform design is proposed so that the baseband units (BBUs) are able to combine both the channel information and the symbol information to suppress the interference. In the uplink transmission, an optimal receiver design algorithm is proposed such that the BBUs can detect the symbols transmitted by the terminal devices (TDs) more accurately by leveraging the channel information. We study the BER performance of the proposed algorithm based on extensive measurements of the wireless channel in a real- world environment. Numerical results demonstrate the significant performance improvement over basic TR transmission techniques.

The explosion of today's wireless traffic requires operators to deploy more access points (APs) and design efficient collaboration mechanism to alleviate the interference among them. However, the collaborative techniques cannot work efficiently due to the high latency and low bandwidth interface between the APs in traditional networks. To address this challenge, cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is proposed, where a pool of base band units (BBUs) are connected to the distributed remote radio heads (RRHs) via high bandwidth and low latency links (i.e., the front-haul) and are responsible for all the baseband processing. But the limited front-haul link capacity may prevent the C-RAN from fully utilizing the benefits made possible by the centralized baseband processing. As a result, the front-haul link capacity becomes a bottleneck. To address this challenge, in this work, we propose using the time-reversal (TR)-based communication as the air interface in C-RAN. Due to the unique spatial and temporal focusing effects of TR-based communications, multiple terminal devices (TDs) are naturally separated by their location-specific signatures. Such a property allows signals to be combined to deliver without demanding more bandwidth. Therefore, the TR-based communication in essence creates a “tunneling” effect such that the baseband signals for all the TDs can be efficiently combined and transmitted in the front-haul. We study the performance of the proposed C-RAN architecture in terms of spectral efficiency and front-haul rate, based on extensive measurements of the wireless channel in a real-world environment. It is shown that with nearly the same amount of traffic load in the front-haul, more information can be transmitted when there are more TDs. The proposed TR tunneling effect can help deliver more information in the C-RAN and alleviate the burden of the front-haul caused by network densification.

In this paper, we present an overview of the time-reversal (TR) wireless paradigm for green Internet of Things (IoT). It is shown that the TR technique is a promising technique that focuses signal waves in both time and space domains. The unique asymmetric architecture significantly reduces the cost of the terminal devices, the total number of which is expected to be very large for IoT. The focusing effect of the TR technique can harvest the energy of all the multi-paths at the receiver, which improves the energy efficiency of the wireless transmission and thus the battery life of terminal devices in IoT. Facilitated by the high-resolution spatial focusing, the TR division multiple access scheme leverages the uniqueness of the multi-path profiles in the rich-scattering environment and maps them into location-specific signatures, so that spatial multiplexing can be achieved for multiple users operating on the same spectrum. In addition, the TR system can easily support heterogeneous terminal devices by providing various quality-of-service (QoS) options through adjusting the waveform and rate backoff factor. Finally, the unique location-specific signature in TR system can provide additional physical-layer security and thus can enhance the privacy and security of customers in IoT. All the advantages show that the TR technique is a promising paradigm for IoT.

The spatial and time focusing effects of time-reversal technology make it an ideal candidate for the low interference downlink system to relieve the coexistence issues among different wireless communication systems. The transmitting power would be concentrated at the intended receiver and the leakage to unintended receivers would be automatically suppressed. In this paper, a time-reversal based secondary user downlink system with the coexistence of primary users is proposed. The primary user's performance loss is investigated in terms of effective SINR degradation and achievable data rate deduction. It is illustrated through numerical examples that the time-reversal downlink system relieves the primary user's performance loss as well as achieves satisfying power efficiency compared with the traditional direct transmission.