Compressed Transport of Baseband Signals in Radio Access Networks

In current wireless base station architectures it is becoming common to physically separate baseband units and radio subsystems. In many wireless technologies this architecture requires allocation of significant transport network resources. In this paper a low-latency baseband signal compression scheme is presented. It significantly lowers transport data rates, resulting in a lower-cost transport network. For example, in LTE the solution results in three times lower data rates compared to the case of uncompressed transmission, while resulting in very low levels of signal distortions. The performance is numerically and experimentally evaluated. It may be applied to different wireless technologies, with appropriate parameter settings, while keeping the architecture identical, i.e., it is technology agnostic. It is parameterized such that a smooth trade-off between the required signal quality and compression performance can be achieved through operator choice of the suitable parameter values. This solution will lead to a costeffective implementation of collocated and distributed network-centric baseband processing, coordinated multi-point (CoMP) and/or distributed antenna system (DAS) which are critical topics for the entire wireless telecommunications industry and infrastructure.