Joint Resource Partitioning and Offloading in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

By Sarabjot Singh, Jeffrey G. Andrews. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2013

362 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs), it is desirable to offload mobile users to small cells, which are typically significantly less congested than the macrocells. To achieve sufficient load balancing, the offloaded users often have much lower SINR than they would on the macrocell. This SINR degradation can be partially alleviated through interference avoidance, for example time or frequency resource partitioning, whereby the macrocell turns off in some fraction of such resources. Naturally, the optimal offloading strategy is tightly coupled with resource partitioning; the optimal amount of which in turn depends on how many users have been offloaded. In this paper, we propose a general and tractable framework for modeling and analyzing joint resource partitioning and offloading in a two-tier cellular network. With it, we are able to derive the downlink rate distribution over the entire network, and an optimal strategy for joint resource partitioning and offloading. We show that load balancing, by itself, is insufficient, and resource partitioning is required in conjunction with offloading to improve the rate of cell edge users in co-channel heterogeneous networks.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd4a53706114fc8ee2e43fc0b0790bfcdb12a358

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Citations in the corpus

Analysis on Cache-Enabled Wireless Heterogeneous Networks (2015, methodology): “Two tiers of BS locations are modeled as independent PPPs in [25], where joint resource partitioning and offloading are analyzed in the HetNet.”
Modeling and Analyzing Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems (2016, methodology): “Such an approximation was subsequently verified numerically in [165]–[168] for Sub-6GHz networks and in [66] and [122] for mmWave networks.”
User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook (2015, background): “In [141], the impact of different user 13 association criteria on the attainable performance of dual connectivity was evaluated via simulations.”
What Will 5G Be? (2014, background): “Even a simple, seemingly highly suboptimal association approach based on aggressive but static biasing towards small cells and blanking about half of the macrocell transmissions has been shown to increase edge rates by as much as 500% [39].”
A survey on 5G: The next generation of mobile communication (2015, methodology): “In a 2-tier architecture, discussed in Section 4.1, user ofﬂoading to a small-cell is useless if there is no resource partitioning [99].”
An overview of load balancing in hetnets: old myths and open problems (2013, methodology): “However, in the case of co-channel offloading, the small cell density does not affect the optimal offloading bias because the interference they cause affects all users equally [12].”