Traditional Radio Access Networks (TRAN) is the RAN that has been in use since the inception of cellular technology. It comprises the Base Station (BS) that makes the connections to sector antennas. These antennas cover a small region depending on their capacity and can handle the reception and transmission of information within this small region only.
In order to to solve the challenges of the TRAN, a possible solution is Cloud-Radio Access Network (C-RAN), which integrates centralized processing, a cloud-based radio access network, and cooperative network. In a C-RAN radio connectivity to end-users is provided via densely deployed low-complexity radio heads, and most signal processing tasks are performed in the cloud. This architecture enables the provisioning of much greater capacity, by allowing both the densification of radio resources and the implementation of sophisticated signal processing algorithms at scale, and doing so at substantially lower capital and energy costs than conventional base-station-centric cellular architectures would require.