Performance Analysis of Fronthaul Compression in Massive MIMO Receiver

Future generations of cellular systems presume to use an extremely high number of antennas to enable mm waves. Increasing the number of antennas requires a growth in connections between a remote radio head (RRH) and a baseband unit (BBU). Therefore, the traffic load between RRH and BBU has to grow, and the compression of interconnection between them becomes a serious problem. In this paper, we propose a compression scheme to reduce the bitrate of the fronthaul interface that connects BBU and RRU. Then we justify compression block size and mantissa length to guarantee the required error vector magnitude (EVM). The knowledge of propagation channel sparsity and the condition number of the channel matrix helps to achieve higher compression ratios without performance loss. Simulation results with a realistic propagation channel are provided to confirm theoretical derivations.