{"ID":6138318,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-09T01:07:32.349475501Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-11T15:07:06.571133786Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07520","arxiv_id":"2607.07520","title":"Energy Efficiency Optimization in Distributed MIMO vRAN via Cross-Layer Link Abstraction","abstract":"Virtualized radio access networks (vRAN) run the compute-intensive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) baseband as software on shared servers, which makes energy efficiency (EE) a primary design objective. Distributed MIMO vRAN consumes power across virtualized distributed unit (vDU) baseband, fronthaul transport, and per-radio-unit operation. We build a power model that resolves these three components. We then develop a framework that jointly selects modulation, transmission rank, and per-subcarrier power to maximize system EE. Exponential effective SNR mapping induces a convex per-subcarrier power constraint, which yields a convex power minimization problem with a closed-form waterfilling-like solution. We show that radio frequency-only models underestimate the spectral efficiency range where single-input multiple-output (SIMO) transmission saves power, and our power model extends this range by 24%. We further extend the framework to a traffic-aware setting with realistic user trajectories from the multi-agent transport simulator. We propose a traffic-aware strategy that switches each radio unit among MIMO, SIMO, and sleep modes based on demand. Simulation results over 3GPP NR compliant fading channels show that, after a one-time offline calibration, the framework predicts link performance without further link-level simulation. The proposed framework achieves higher average EE than a traffic-agnostic always-on MIMO baseline, while maintaining comparable throughput at peak hours.","short_abstract":"Virtualized radio access networks (vRAN) run the compute-intensive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) baseband as software on shared servers, which makes energy efficiency (EE) a primary design objective. Distributed MIMO vRAN consumes power across virtualized distributed unit (vDU) baseband, fronthaul transport, an...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07520","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.07520v1","authors":"[\"Jaebum Park\",\"Chan-Byoung Chae\",\"Robert W. Heath\"]","published":"2026-07-08T15:16:53Z","proceeding":"eess.SP","tasks":"[\"eess.SP\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}