Chapter 14: Fronthaul-Aware Design

Learning Objectives

• Explain why the fronthaul link is the fundamental bottleneck in distributed MIMO and cell-free networks
• Distinguish between CPRI and eCPRI and quantify their capacity requirements
• Derive achievable rates for quantize-and-forward and estimate-and-forward uplink strategies under finite fronthaul
• Formulate the Wyner-Ziv compression approach for exploiting side information at the central processor
• Analyze compression-based precoding strategies for the downlink under fronthaul constraints
• Describe the Göttsch/Li/Caire joint fronthaul load balancing and computation resource allocation framework
• Map the O-RAN functional split options onto fronthaul capacity requirements and processing complexity tradeoffs