Compression and decompression between elements of a wireless communications system (wcs)

A wireless communications system (WCS), comprising:

• a head end unit;
• and
• a plurality of remote units each coupled to the head end unit via a transport medium;
• wherein the head end unit comprises a compression unit, comprising:
• a size calculator unit configured to evaluate channel requirements to determine a fast Fourier transform (FFT) block size;
• a variable-sized FFT unit coupled to the size calculator unit and configured to:
• perform an FFT operation on digital samples to produce a transformed signal;
• and
• a transformed signal compression unit coupled to the variable-sized FFT unit and configured to apply a compression algorithm on the transformed signal to produce a compressed signal;
• and
• a fronthaul interface coupled to the compression unit and configured to:
• receive the compressed signal;
• couple to the transport medium;
• and
• send the compressed signal over the transport medium.