Joint Cell Grouping and User Association Scheme for Clustered Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Abstract

In this paper, a joint cell grouping and user association technique proposed for a semi-dynamic grouped network MIMO in a clustered heterogeneous cellular network (HCN). With the conventional macro BSs, small cells are being overlaid to increase a spectral efficiency per area and these small cells are expected to be concentrated to support exponentially increasing data traffic in hot spot areas. The main culprits of performance degradation in the clustered HCN are interference and load imbalance. The proposed scheme jointly handles them to maximize a proportional-fair metric. It is shown that the proposed technique can largely improve user average rate and proportional fairness among users than any other conventional schemes in the clustered HCN.