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Distributed User Association with Resource Partitioning in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

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Abstract

To fully utilize the resources of heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs), an effective approach that offloads users to the underloaded small cells from overloaded macrocells is widely advocated. However, this operation often leads to a bad result that the offloaded users achieve lower signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) than these users in macrocells. Thus, some appropriate interference avoidance techniques should be adopted to partially alleviate the SINR degradation. For this, we consider the resource (frequency) partitioning that turns off some fraction of such resources in a macrocell. Naturally, an optimal offloading strategy should be closely coupled with resource partitioning, and in turn the optimal partition decides the offloading performance. In this paper, we propose a distributed association strategy with joint offloading and resource partitioning for HCNs. We reveal that load balancing, by itself, is insufficient, and additional resource partitioning is required to improve system performance. Meanwhile, we also show that, compared with the best power association and range extension association, the proposed scheme provides better association performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61372101, 61422105 and 61271018, the National Science and Technology Major Project of China under Grants 2013ZX03003006-002 and 2012ZX03004-005-003, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20130019, the Research Project of Jiangsu Province under Grant BE2012167, the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-11-0088, the Joint Funds of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant U1404615, and the Open Funds of State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves under Grant K201504.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Engineering, East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang, 330013, China

    Tian-Qing Zhou

  2. School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 210009, China

    Yong-Ming Huang, Yuan Sun & Lu-Xi Yang

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  1. Tian-Qing Zhou
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  2. Yong-Ming Huang
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Correspondence to Tian-Qing Zhou.

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Zhou, TQ., Huang, YM., Sun, Y. et al. Distributed User Association with Resource Partitioning in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 95, 4131–4148 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4054-1

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