Distributed cell selection in heterogeneous wireless networks

A critical issue in many wireless networks is how to establish the best possible quality connections between users to base stations. This is in particular challenging when users are randomly located over a geographical region, and each covered by a number of heterogeneous base stations. To this end, we design a smart and efficient cell selection mechanism to improve the user-base station connection in heterogeneous wireless networks. We formulate the cell selection problem as an asymmetric congestion game with consideration of users' heterogeneity in their locations and their data rates to various cells. We show the existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE) and propose a concurrent distributed learning algorithm to converge to them. In the algorithm, we allow users to perform random error-tolerant updates synchronously, and guarantee them to reach one or multiple PNE with the largest utilities. In addition, we do a systematical investigation on the implementation of the algorithm in practical networks. Simulation results show that the algorithm can achieve satisfactory performance with acceptable convergence rate. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.