In this paper, we investigate the potential benefits of the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) enabled heterogeneous cloud radio access network (C-RAN) in terms of the secrecy and energy efficiency (EE). In this network, both remote radio heads (RRHs) and massive MIMO macrocell base stations are deployed and soft fractional frequency reuse is adopted to mitigate the intertier interference. We first examine the physical layer security by deriving the area ergodic secrecy rate and secrecy outage probability. Our results reveal that the use of massive MIMO and C-RAN can greatly improve the secrecy performance. For C-RAN, a large number of RRHs achieves high area ergodic secrecy rate and low-secrecy outage probability, due to its powerful interference management. We find that for massive MIMO aided macrocells, having more antennas and serving more users improves secrecy performance. Then, we derive the EE of the heterogeneous C-RAN, illustrating that increasing the number of RRHs significantly enhances the network EE. Furthermore, it is indicated that allocating more radio resources to the RRHs can linearly increase the EE of RRH tier and improve the network EE without affecting the EE of the macrocells.
Funding
This work was supported by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under Grants EP/M016005/1, EP/M016145/1, and EP/M015475/1.
History
School
Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering
Published in
IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Volume
10
Issue
8
Pages
1375 - 1389
Citation
WANG, L. ... et al, 2016. Secrecy and energy efficiency in massive MIMO aided heterogeneous C-RAN: a new look at interference. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 10 (8), pp. 1375-1389.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Acceptance date
2016-07-12
Publication date
2016-08-16
Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by IEEE under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/