Achieving Ultra-Low Latency for Network Coding-Aware Multicast Fronthaul Transmission in Cache-Enabled C-RANs

In cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) architecture, the Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) protocol imposes a strict limit on the latency between the baseband unit (BBU) pool and the remote radio head (RRH), which is a key challenge in the adoption of C-RANs. In this letter, we propose a joint edge caching and network coding strategy (ENC) in the C-RANs with multicast fronthaul to improve the performance of HARQ and thus achieve ultra-low latency in 5G cellular systems. We formulate the edge caching design as an optimization problem for maximizing caching utility so as to obtain the optimal caching time. Then, for real-time data flows with different latency constraints, we propose a scheduling policy based on network coding group (NCG) to maximize coding opportunities and thus improve the overall latency performance of multicast fronthaul transmission. We evaluate the performance of ENC by conducting simulation experiments based on NS-3. Numerical results show that ENC can efficiently reduce the delivery delay.