Abstract : Residential power line is considered a cost-effective communication media for building a digital indoor distributed network thanks to its ubiquity in the indoor environment. This paper investigates a front-hauling system under the split centralized radio access network (C-RAN) architecture, aiming to examine the feasibility of implementing common public radio interface (CPRI) over power line communication (PLC) channels. Particularly, we introduce a novel device called CPRI-PLC gateway (CPG) that provides a virtual CPRI link over the PLC channel to ensure high reliability and efficiency in delivering the CPRI hyper-frames (HFs) between the data unit (DU) and radio unit (RU). We examine the proposed CPRI over PLC system via extensive simulations in terms of the achievable throughput and reliability.
Index terms : Centralized radio access network (C-RAN), common public radio interface (CPRI), front-haul, hybrid automatic repeat request (H-ARQ), impulsive noise detection & re-transmission (IND-Re), power line communication (PLC).