Picocellular architectures are essential for providing the spatial reuse required to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for mobile data. A key deployment challenge is to provide backhaul connections with sufficiently high data rate. Providing wired support (e.g., using optical fiber) to pico base stations deployed opportunistically on lampposts and rooftops is impractical, hence wireless backhaul becomes an attractive approach. A multihop mesh network comprised of directional millimeter wave links is considered here for this purpose. The backhaul design problem is formulated as one of joint routing and resource allocation, accounting for mutual interference across simultaneously active links. A computationally tractable formulation is developed by leveraging the localized nature of interference and the provable existence of a sparse optimal allocation. Numerical results are provided for millimeter (mm) wave mesh networks, which are well suited for scaling backhaul data rates due to abundance of spectrum, and the ability to form highly directional, electronically steerable beams.
 This paper studies the joint user association and resource allocation in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) from a novel perspective, motivated by and generalizing the idea of fractional frequency reuse. By treating the multi-cell multi-user resource allocation as resource partitioning among multiple reuse patterns, we propose a unified framework to analyze and compare a wide range of user association and resource allocation strategies for HetNets, and provide an optimal benchmark for network performance. The enabling mechanisms are a novel formulation to consider all possible interference patterns or any pre-defined subset of patterns, and efficient sparsity-pursuit algorithms to find the solution. A notable feature of this formulation is that the patterns remain fixed during the resource optimization process. This creates a favorable opportunity for convex formulations while still considering interference coupling. More important, in view of the fact that multi-cell resource allocation is very computational demanding, our framework provides a systematic way to trade off performance for the reduction of computational complexity by restricting the candidate patterns to a small number of feature patterns. Relying on the sparsity-pursuit capability of the proposed algorithms, we develop a practical guideline to identify the feature patterns. Numerical results show that the identified feature patterns can significantly improve the existing strategies, and jointly optimizing the user association and resource allocation indeed brings considerable gain. Next generation (5G) cellular networks are expected to be supported by an extensive infrastructure with many-fold increase in the number of cells per unit area compared to today. The total energy consumption of base transceiver stations (BTSs) is an important issue for both economic and environmental reasons. In this paper, an optimization-based framework is proposed for energy-efficient global radio resource management in heterogeneous wireless networks. Specifically, with stochastic arrivals of known rates intended for users, the smallest set of BTSs is activated with jointly optimized user association and spectrum allocation to stabilize the network. The average delay is subsequently minimized. The scheme can be carried out periodically on a relatively slow timescale to adapt to aggregate traffic variations and average channel conditions. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces energy consumption and increases quality of service compared to existing schemes. This work studies centralized slow-timescale spectrum management in metropolitan area networks with a very large number of access points (APs) and user equipments (UEs). The joint spectrum allocation and user association problem is first formulated as a convex optimization problem with an exponential number of variables in the network size. A scalable reformulation is obtained by exploiting the geometric graph nature of the network and provable sparsity of the optimal solution. A pattern pursuit algorithm with low complexity is proposed to solve the reformulated problem with guaranteed gap to the global optimum. Efficient algorithms are developed to obtain near-optimal allocations for a network with up to 1000 APs and 2500 active users. Numerical results show that the proposed solution achieves significant gains in terms of delay and throughput over existing schemes and is within 7 to the global optimum in a typical scenario. Joint allocation of spectrum and user association is considered for a large cellular network. The objective is to optimize a network utility function such as average delay given traffic statistics collected over a slow timescale. A key challenge is scalability: given n access points (APs), there are O(2n) ways in which the APs can share the spectrum. The number of variables is reduced from O(2n) to O(nk), where k is the number of users, by optimizing over local overlapping neighborhoods, defined by interference conditions, and by exploiting the existence of sparse solutions in which the spectrum is divided into k+1 segments. We reformulate the problem by optimizing the assignment of subsets of active APs to those segments. An l o constraint enforces a one-to-one mapping of subsets to spectrum segments, and an iterative (reweighted l 1 ) algorithm is used to find an approximate solution. Numerical results for a network with 100 APs serving several hundred users show the proposed method achieves a substantial increase in total throughput relative to benchmark schemes.