Flexible Multiple Base Station Association and Activation for Downlink Heterogeneous Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a flexible multi-BS association and power optimization scheme for downlink heterogeneous networks, significantly enhancing performance and energy efficiency over traditional single-BS association methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint optimization framework for multi-BS association and power control, employing gradient projection and proximal gradient methods.

Findings

Significant performance improvements over single-BS association.

Effective power savings by turning off off-peak base stations.

Enhanced network utility through flexible association strategies.

Abstract

This letter shows that the flexible association of possibly multiple base stations (BSs) to each user over multiple frequency bands, along with the joint optimization of BS transmit power that encourages the turning-off of the BSs at off-peak time, can significantly improve the performance of a downlink heterogeneous wireless cellular network. We propose a gradient projection algorithm for optimizing BS association and an iteratively reweighting scheme together with a novel proximal gradient method for optimizing power in order to find the optimal tradeoff between network utility and power consumption. Simulation results reveal significant performance improvement as compared to the conventional single-BS association.