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Fast and efficient energy-oriented cell assignment in heterogeneous networks

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Abstract

The cell assignment problem is combinatorial, with increased complexity when it is tackled considering resource allocation. This paper models joint cell assignment and resource allocation for cellular heterogeneous networks, and formalizes cell assignment as an optimization problem. Exact algorithms can find optimal solutions to the cell assignment problem, but their execution time increases drastically with realistic network deployments. In turn, heuristics are able to find solutions in reasonable execution times, but they get usually stuck in local optima, thus failing to find optimal solutions. Metaheuristic approaches have been successful in finding solutions closer to the optimum one to combinatorial problems for large instances. In this paper we propose a fast and efficient heuristic that yields very competitive cell assignment solutions compared to those obtained with three of the most widely-used metaheuristics, which are known to find solutions close to the optimum due to the nature of their search space exploration. Our heuristic approach adds energy expenditure reduction in its algorithmic design. Through simulation and formal statistical analysis, the proposed scheme has been proved to produce efficient assignments in terms of the number of served users, resource allocation and energy savings, while being an order of magnitude faster than metaheuritsic-based approaches.

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Acknowledgements

This paper has been supported by the National Council of Research and Technology (CONACYT) through Grant FONCICYT/272278 and the ERANetLAC (Network of the European Union, Latin America, and the Caribbean Countries) Project ELAC2015/T100761. This paper is partially supported also by the ADVICE Project, TEC2015-71329 (MINECO/FEDER) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 777067 (NECOS Project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CINVESTAV-Tamaulipas, Cd. Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico

    Javier Rubio-Loyola & Christian Aguilar-Fuster

  2. Communication Engineering Department, University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain

    Luis Diez & Ramon Agüero

  3. Telematics Engineering Department, Polytechnical University of Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Juan Luis-Gorricho & Joan Serrat

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  1. Javier Rubio-Loyola
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Correspondence to Javier Rubio-Loyola.

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Rubio-Loyola, J., Aguilar-Fuster, C., Diez, L. et al. Fast and efficient energy-oriented cell assignment in heterogeneous networks. Wireless Netw 26, 3119–3137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-019-02047-x

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