  The performance of cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is constrained by the
limited fronthaul link capacity under future heavy data traffic. To tackle this
problem, extensive efforts have been devoted to design efficient signal
quantization/compression techniques in the fronthaul to maximize the network
throughput. However, most of the previous results are based on
information-theoretical quantization methods, which are hard to implement due
to the extremely high complexity. In this paper, we consider using practical
uniform scalar quantization in the uplink communication of an orthogonal
frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based C-RAN system, where the mobile
users are assigned with orthogonal sub-carriers for multiple access. In
particular, we consider joint wireless power control and fronthaul quantization
design over the sub-carriers to maximize the system end-to-end throughput.
Efficient algorithms are proposed to solve the joint optimization problem when
either information-theoretical or practical fronthaul quantization method is
applied. Interestingly, we find that the fronthaul capacity constraints have
significant impact to the optimal wireless power control policy. As a result,
the joint optimization shows significant performance gain compared with either
optimizing wireless power control or fronthaul quantization alone. Besides, we
also show that the proposed simple uniform quantization scheme performs very
close to the throughput performance upper bound, and in fact overlaps with the
upper bound when the fronthaul capacity is sufficiently large. Overall, our
results would help reveal practically achievable throughput performance of
C-RAN, and lead to more efficient deployment of C-RAN in the next-generation
wireless communication systems.
