Fog Radio Access Network: A New Wireless Backhaul Architecture for Small Cell Networks

In this paper, we develop a novel wireless backhauling strategy for small-cell networks based on dynamic base station (BSs) cooperation, which we call the fog-radio access network (F-RAN) backhauling strategy. By taking advantage of fog-computing, our proposed strategy enables BSs to combine and process signals received from diverse paths, which can significantly increase the transmission efficiency of the backhaul network. We first model an F-RAN-enabled network and three existing backhauling strategies, namely, direct transmission, decode and forward, and cloud-RAN. We then analyze and compare the performance of these strategies. The numerical results show that our proposed strategy provides the highest throughput for cell edge users while maintaining the same performance in most of the other areas. Moreover, for dense small-cell networks with poor backhaul channels, F-RAN outperforms all other strategies.