Our traditional notion of a cell is changing dramatically given the increasing degree of heterogeneity in 4G and emerging 5G systems. Rather than belonging to a specific cell, a device would choose the most suitable connection from the plethora of connections available. In such a setting, given the transmission powers differ significantly between downlink (DL) and uplink (UL), a wireless device that sees multiple Base Stations (BSs) may access the infrastructure in a way that it receives the downlink (DL) traffic from one BS and sends uplink (UL) traffic through another BS. This situation is referred to as Downlink and Uplink Decoupling (DUDe). In this paper, the capacity and throughput gains brought by decoupling are rigorously derived using stochastic geometry. Theoretical findings are then corroborated by means of simulation results. A further constituent of this paper is the verification of the theoretically derived results by means of a real-world system simulation platform. Despite theoretical assumptions differing from the very complete system simulator, the trends in the association probabilities and capacity gains are similar. Based on the promising results, we then outline architectural changes needed to facilitate the decoupling of DL and UL.
Notably, the most recent contributions @cite_15 @cite_21 have studied the impact of having a cell association which is different for downlink and uplink. The authors of @cite_15 have investigated the throughput and outage gains via the real-world simulation tool Atoll; the simulation results have yielded important performance gains which increase with an increasing density of small cells. The authors of @cite_21 then studied the association probabilities in more details, i.e. the probabilities that a device would associate i) both DL and UL to the Mcell; ii) DL to Scell and UL to Mcell; iii) DL to Mcell and UL to Scell; and iv) both DL and UL to the Scell.
@cite_15 @cite_21
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Wireless cellular networks evolve towards a heterogeneous infrastructure, featuring multiple types of Base Stations (BSs), such as Femto BSs (FBSs) and Macro BSs (MBSs). A wireless device observes multiple points (BSs) through which it can access the infrastructure and it may choose to receive the downlink (DL) traffic from one BS and send uplink (UL) traffic through another BS. Such a situation is referred to as decoupled DL UL access . Using the framework of stochastic geometry, we derive the association probability for DL UL. To maximize the average received power, as the relative density of FBSs initially increases, a large fraction of devices chooses decoupled access, i.e., receive from a MBS in DL and transmit through a FBS in UL. We analyze the impact that this type of association has on the average throughput in the system. The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) concept, in which densely deployed access points (APs) are empowered by cloud computing to cooperatively support mobile users (MUs), to improve mobile data rates, has been recently proposed. However, the high density of active APs results in severe interference and also inefficient energy consumption. Moreover, the growing popularity of highly interactive applications with stringent uplink (UL) requirements, e.g., network gaming and real-time broadcasting by wireless users, means that the UL transmission is becoming more crucial and requires special attention. Therefore in this paper, we propose a joint downlink (DL) and UL MU-AP association and beamforming design to coordinate interference in the C-RAN for energy minimization, a problem which is shown to be NP hard. Due to the new consideration of UL transmission, it is shown that the two state-of-the-art approaches for finding computationally efficient solutions of joint MU-AP association and beamforming considering only the DL, i.e., group-sparse optimization and relaxed-integer programming, cannot be modified in a straightforward way to solve our problem. Leveraging on the celebrated UL-DL duality result, we show that by establishing a virtual DL transmission for the original UL transmission, the joint DL and UL optimization problem can be converted to an equivalent DL problem in C-RAN with two inter-related subproblems for the original and virtual DL transmissions, respectively. Based on this transformation, two efficient algorithms for joint DL and UL MU-AP association and beamforming design are proposed, whose performances are evaluated and compared with other benchmarking schemes through e