  Over-the-air computation (AirComp) has recently been recognized as a
promising scheme for a fusion center to achieve fast distributed data
aggregation in wireless networks via exploiting the superposition property of
multiple-access channels. Since it is challenging to provide reliable data
aggregation for a large number of devices using AirComp, in this paper, we
propose to enable AirComp via the cloud radio access network (Cloud-RAN)
architecture, where a large number of antennas are deployed at separate sites
called remote radio heads (RRHs). However, the potential densification gain
provided by Cloud-RAN is generally bottlenecked by the limited capacity of the
fronthaul links connecting the RRHs and the fusion center. To this end, we
formulate a joint design problem for AirComp transceivers and quantization bits
allocation and propose an efficient algorithm to tackle this problem. Our
numerical results shows the advantages of the proposed architecture compared
with the state-of-the-art solutions.
