Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) has been proposed as a promising architecture to meet the exponential growth in data traffic demands and to overcome the challenges of next generation mobile networks (5G). The main concept of C-RAN is to decouple the BaseBand Units (BBU) and the Remote Radio Heads (RRH), and place the BBUs in common edge data centers (BBU pools) for centralized processing. This gives a number of benefits in terms of cost savings, network capacity improvement and resource utilization gains. However, network operators need to investigate scalable and cost-efficient algorithms for resource allocation problems to enable and facilitate the deployment of C-RAN architecture. Most of these problems are very complex and thus very hard to solve. Hence, we use combinatorial optimization which provides powerful tools to efficiently address these problems.One of the key issues in the deployment of C-RAN is finding the optimal assignment of RRHs (or antennas) to edge data centers (BBUs) when jointly optimizing the fronthaul latency and resource consumption. We model this problem by a mathematical formulation based on an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) approach to provide the optimal strategies for the RRH-BBU assignment problem and we propose also low-complexity heuristic algorithms to rapidly reach good solutions for large problem instances. The optimal RRH-BBU assignment reduces the expected latency and offers resource utilization gains. Such gains can only be achieved when reducing the inter-cell interference caused by the dense deployment of cell sites. We propose an exact mathematical formulation based on Branch-and-Cut methods that enables to consolidate and re-optimize the antennas radii in order to jointly minimize inter-cell interference and guarantee a full network coverage in C-RAN. In addition to the increase of inter-cell interference, the high density of cells in C-RAN increases the amount of baseband processing as well as the amount of data traffic demands between antennas and centralized data centers when strong latency requirements on fronthaul network should be met. Therefore, we discuss in the third part of this thesis how to determine the optimal placement of BBU functions when considering 3GPP split option to find optimal tradeoffs between benefits of centralization in C-RAN and transport requirements. We propose exact and heuristic algorithms based on combinatorial optimization techniques to rapidly provide optimal or near-optimal solutions even for large network sizes.