The joint user association and spectrum allocation problem is studied for multi-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets) in both downlink and uplink in the interference-limited regime. Users are associated with base-stations (BSs) based on the biased downlink received power. Spectrum is either shared or orthogonally partitioned among the tiers. This paper models the placement of BSs in different tiers as spatial point processes and adopts stochastic geometry to derive the theoretical mean proportionally fair utility of the network based on the coverage rate. By formulating and solving the network utility maximization problem, the optimal user association bias factors and spectrum partition ratios are analytically obtained for the multi-tier network. The resulting analysis reveals that the downlink and uplink user associations do not have to be symmetric. For uplink under spectrum sharing, if all tiers have the same target signal-to-interference ratio (SIR), distance-based user association is shown to be optimal under a variety of path loss and power control settings. For both downlink and uplink, under orthogonal spectrum partition, it is shown that the optimal proportion of spectrum allocated to each tier should match the proportion of users associated with that tier. Simulations validate the analytical results. Under typical system parameters, simulation results suggest that spectrum partition performs better for downlink in terms of utility, while spectrum sharing performs better for uplink with power control.
Part of this work has appeared in @cite_38 @cite_29 , which contain the analysis and optimization of the downlink case.
@cite_38 @cite_29
2148562694 2133705997
This paper considers the joint optimization of frequency reuse and base-station (BS) bias for user association in downlink heterogeneous networks for load balancing and intercell interference management. To make the analysis tractable, we assume that BSs are randomly deployed as point processes in multiple tiers, where BSs in each tier have different transmission powers and spatial densities. A utility maximization framework is formulated based on the user coverage rate, which is a function of the different BS biases for user association and different frequency reuse factors across BS tiers. Compared to previous works where the bias levels are heuristically determined and full reuse is adopted, we quantitatively compute the optimal user association bias and obtain the closed-form solution of the optimal frequency reuse. Interestingly, we find that the optimal bias and the optimal reuse factor of each BS tier have an inversely proportional relationship. Further, we also propose an iterative method for optimizing these two factors. In contrast to system-level optimization solutions based on specific channel realization and network topology, our approach is off-line and is useful for deriving deployment insights. Numerical results show that optimizing user association and frequency reuse for multi-tier heterogeneous networks can effectively improve cell-edge user rate performance and utility. The joint spectrum partition and user association problem for multi-tier heterogeneous networks is studied in this paper, where disjoint spectrums are allocated among tiers and users are associated with each tier with a biased received power. The random placement of base-stations (BSs) of different tiers are modeled using stochastic geometry, which accounts for their practical deployment and also makes analysis tractable. We derive an upper bound of the average user proportional fair utility based on the user coverage rate, from which we formulate a network utility maximization problem. The optimization of the proposed utility bound shows that the optimal spectrum allocation for each BS tier matches the average proportion of users associated with that tier. The solution to the optimization problem also provides closed-form expressions for the optimal user associated bias factors. Compared to system-level optimization solutions based on specific network topology and channel realization, our offline analytical approach offers deployment insights. Simulation results demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.