User Association for Load Balancing in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

For small cell technology to significantly increase the capacity of tower-based cellular networks, mobile users will need to be actively pushed onto the more lightly loaded tiers (corresponding to, e.g., pico and femtocells), even if they offer a lower instantaneous SINR than the macrocell base stat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 12; no. 6; pp. 2706 - 2716
Main Authors: Qiaoyang Ye, Beiyu Rong, Yudong Chen, Al-Shalash, M., Caramanis, C., Andrews, J. G.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.06.2013
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Cellular
Cellular communication
distributed algorithm
Distributed algorithms
Equipments and installations
Exact sciences and technology
Gain
heterogeneous cellular networks
Heuristic
Interference
Joints
Load balancing
Load management
Macrocell networks
Mathematical analysis
Mathematical models
Maximization
Mobile radiocommunication systems
Optimization
Radiocommunications
range expansion
Resource management
Signal to noise ratio
Stations
Studies
Systems, networks and services of telecommunications
Telecommunications
Telecommunications and information theory
Transmission and modulation (techniques and equipments)
user association
Wireless communication
Performance evaluation
Mobile radiocommunication
range expansion
Cellular radio
Base station
Wireless telecommunication
Information rate
Cell network
Information transmission
Implementation
Optimization
heterogeneous cellular networks
Relaxation
Optimal solution
Distributed algorithm
Algorithm complexity
NP hard problem
Telecommunication network
Numerical simulation
Load balancing
Signal to interference plus noise ratio
user association
User need
ISSN:1536-1276, 1558-2248
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:For small cell technology to significantly increase the capacity of tower-based cellular networks, mobile users will need to be actively pushed onto the more lightly loaded tiers (corresponding to, e.g., pico and femtocells), even if they offer a lower instantaneous SINR than the macrocell base station (BS). Optimizing a function of the long-term rate for each user requires (in general) a massive utility maximization problem over all the SINRs and BS loads. On the other hand, an actual implementation will likely resort to a simple biasing approach where a BS in tier j is treated as having its SINR multiplied by a factor A j ≥ 1, which makes it appear more attractive than the heavily-loaded macrocell. This paper bridges the gap between these approaches through several physical relaxations of the network-wide association problem, whose solution is NP hard. We provide a low-complexity distributed algorithm that converges to a near-optimal solution with a theoretical performance guarantee, and we observe that simple per-tier biasing loses surprisingly little, if the bias values A j are chosen carefully. Numerical results show a large (3.5x) throughput gain for cell-edge users and a 2x rate gain for median users relative to a maximizing received power association.
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ISSN:1536-1276
1558-2248
DOI:10.1109/TWC.2013.040413.120676