A cloud based radio access network architecture for 4G and smart grid communication systems

This thesis develops the next logical evolution of highly advanced wireless network infrastructure to support 4G and beyond: the integration of cloud data center systems, radio access network technology, and advanced applications such as smart grid. The cloud data center systems we introduce and analyze are capable of hosting radio access networks denoted as C-RAN (cloud radio access networks). Several C-RAN system challenges involving delay caused by wireless, computational, and network have been analyzed and solutions are presented in this thesis. In addition, in this thesis we develop the architecture for a C-RAN based cognitive radio (CR) smart grid communication networks. Our network architecture enables metropolitan scale cognitive radio based smart meter networks. CR networks however impose unique challenges resulting from high fluctuation in available spectrum in both time and space. The C-RAN framework is used to develop interference-aware resource management scheme that exploits dynamic channel allocation reuse technique to share the spectrum. Our simulation result show 5xtimes increased cell capacity and fair resource allocation in CR networks.