Dynamic cell association for downlink sum rate maximization in multi-cell heterogeneous networks

Abstract

In this work, we consider a heterogeneous network consisting in several macro nodes and pico nodes. Our goal is to associate users, belonging to this network, to one of the nodes, while maximizing the sum rate of all users. We also want to analyze the load balancing achieved by this association. Therefore, we develop a new theoretical framework to study cell association for the downlink of multi-cell networks and derive an upper bound on the achievable sum rate. We propose a dynamic cell association heuristic, which achieves performance close to optimal. Finally, we verify our results through numerical evaluations and implement the proposed heuristic in an LTE simulator to demonstrate its viability.