  Cloud radio access network (CRAN), in which remote radio heads (RRHs) are
deployed to serve users in a target area, and connected to a central processor
(CP) via limited-capacity links termed the fronthaul, is a promising candidate
for the next-generation wireless communication systems. Due to the
content-centric nature of future wireless communications, it is desirable to
cache popular contents beforehand at the RRHs, to reduce the burden on the
fronthaul and achieve energy saving through cooperative transmission. This
motivates our study in this paper on the energy efficient transmission in an
orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)-based CRAN with multiple
RRHs and users, where the RRHs can prefetch popular contents. We consider a
joint optimization of the user-SC assignment, RRH selection and transmit power
allocation over all the SCs to minimize the total transmit power of the RRHs,
subject to the RRHs' individual fronthaul capacity constraints and the users'
minimum rate constraints, while taking into account the caching status at the
RRHs. Although the problem is non-convex, we propose a Lagrange duality based
solution, which can be efficiently computed with good accuracy. We compare the
minimum transmit power required by the proposed algorithm with different
caching strategies against the case without caching by simulations, which show
the significant energy saving with caching.
