  This paper is interested in maximizing the total throughput of cloud radio
access networks (CRANs) in which multiple radio remote heads (RRHs) are
connected to a central computing unit known as the cloud. The transmit frame of
each RRH consists of multiple radio resources blocks (RRBs), and the cloud is
responsible for synchronizing these RRBS and scheduling them to users. Unlike
previous works that consider allocating each RRB to only a single user at each
time instance, this paper proposes to mix the flows of multiple users in each
RRB using instantly decodable network coding (IDNC). The proposed scheme is
thus designed to jointly schedule the users to different RRBs, choose the
encoded file sent in each of them, and the rate at which each of them is
transmitted. Hence, the paper maximizes the throughput which is defined as the
number of correctly received bits. To jointly fulfill this objective, we design
a graph in which each vertex represents a possible user-RRB association,
encoded file, and transmission rate. By appropriately choosing the weights of
vertices, the scheduling problem is shown to be equivalent to a maximum weight
clique problem over the newly introduced graph. Simulation results illustrate
the significant gains of the proposed scheme compared to classical coding and
uncoded solutions.
