Joint Shareable Resource Allocation and User Association for Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Resource allocation and user association are two key issues in the heterogeneous wireless cellular networks. The joint optimization on these two problems is considered as N-Phard and hence it is difficult to achieve the exact solution effectively. In this paper a novel shareable resource allocation and user association scheme is proposed with frequency reusing taken into consideration. The optimization problem on the whole networks is divided in two stages: (1) resource allocation for each base station (BS) and (2) user association. In stage one, based on the priori traffic spatial distribution, an adaptive allocation algorithm is provided, which can increase the frequency reuse performance. In stage two, each user is associated with a BS and assigned some physical resource blocks (PRBs) by a relaxed convex optimization. Numerical results show that the approach achieves load balancing across macro and small cell BSs, and provide higher network throughput compared to the max SINR and SINR bias scheme. The results also show that the suboptimal solution takes a tradeoff between user fairness and network throughput.