  Massive MIMO's immense potential to serve large number of users at fast data
rates also comes with the caveat of requiring tremendous processing power. This
favours a centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture that
concentrates the processing power at a common baseband unit (BBU) connected to
multiple remote radio heads (RRH) via fronthaul links. The high bandwidths of
5G make the fronthaul data rate a major bottleneck. Since the number of active
users in a massive MIMO system is much smaller than the number of antennas, we
propose a dimension reduction scheme based on low rank approximation for
fronthaul data compression. Link level simulations show that the proposed
method achieves more than 17x compression while also improving the error
performance of the system through denoising.
