Design and Performance Analysis of an SDN-based Virtual Cell-Free Fog-RAN Architecture in 6G Networks
A user-centric cell-free (CF) massive multiple input multiple output (mMIMO) is considered as the promising solution, to cope with the increasing data rate demands of the sixth generation (6G) wireless communications, in which each user is served by surrounding access points (APs) without experiencing cell boundaries. The key objective of this research is to redesign the SDN-based virtual Fog-RAN architecture by employing the user-centric CF-mMIMO system to enable the architecture to meet the requirements of 6G networks. Moreover, the CF-mMIMO challenges are important to be considered such as reliable fronthaul and backhaul communication, user-centric serving cluster, resource allocation and signal processing. Furthermore, the promising technology in 6G networks including terahertz (THz) communication, and blockchain-based spectrum sharing will be investigated. To validate the proposed architecture, the impact of SDN, NFV, CF-mMIMO on the Fog-RAN performance are extensively analysed through the different scenarios to highlight the performance gains.