Joint Mode Selection and Resource Allocation for Downlink Fog Radio Access Networks Supported D2D

Presented as an innovative paradigm incorporating the cloud computing into radio access network, Cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been shown advantageous in curtailing the capital and operating expenditures as well as providing better services to the customers. However, heavy burden on the non-ideal fronthaul limits performances of CRANs. Here we focus on the alleviation of burden on the fronthaul via the edge devices’ caches and propose a fog computing based RAN (F-RAN) architecture with three candidate transmission modes: device to device, local distributed coordination, and global C-RAN. Followed by the proposed simple mode selection scheme, the average energy efficiency (EE) of systems optimization problem considering congestion control is presented. Under the Lyapunov framework, the problem is reformulated as a joint mode selection and resource allocation problem, which can be solved by block coordinate descent method. The mathematical analysis and simulation results validate the benefits of F-RAN and an EE-delay tradeoff can be achieved by the proposed algorithm.