text: A scalable framework is developed to allocate radio resources across a large number of densely deployed small cells with given traffic statistics on a slow timescale. Joint user association and spectrum allocation is first formulated as a convex optimization problem by dividing the spectrum among all possible transmission patterns of active access points (APs). To improve scalability with the number of APs, the problem is reformulated using local patterns of interfering APs. To maintain global consistency among local patterns, inter-cluster interaction is characterized as hyper-edges in a hyper-graph with nodes corresponding to neighborhoods of APs. A scalable solution is obtained by iteratively solving a convex optimization problem for bandwidth allocation with reduced complexity and constructing a global spectrum allocation using hyper-graph coloring. Numerical results demonstrate the proposed solution for a network with 100 APs and several hundred user equipments. For a given quality of service (QoS), the proposed scheme can increase the network capacity several fold compared to assigning each user to the strongest AP with full-spectrum reuse.
  @cite_16: 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.
  @cite_7: Characterizing user to access point (AP) association strategies in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) is critical for their performance analysis, as it directly influences the load across the network. In this letter, we introduce and analyze a class of association strategies, which we term stationary association, and the resulting association cells. For random HetNets, where APs are distributed according to a stationary point process, the area of the resulting association cells are shown to be the marks of the corresponding point process. Addressing the need of quantifying the load experienced by a typical user, a "Feller-paradox" like relationship is established between the area of the association cell containing origin and that of a typical association cell. For the specific case of Poisson point process and max power association, the mean association area of each tier is derived and shown to increase with channel gain variance and decrease in the path loss exponents of the corresponding tier.
summary: The stochastic geometry framework way proposed to evaluate and optimize the expected system performance over random topologies and channel conditions @cite_7 @cite_16 . The approach does not apply to the optimization of resource allocation to all possible interference patterns as considered in this paper.