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QoS-Aware Balanced and Unbalanced Associations in Massive MIMO Enabled Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

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Abstract

As for the massive MIMO (multiple-input and multiple-output) enabled HCNs, we design a QoS-aware association scheme to maximize the sum of achievable rates under long-term rate constraints. Since the various BSs have different transmit power and antennas, this scheme (unbalanced association) may result in an extremely imbalanced load distribution. To fully exploit the network resources, we design another scheme (balanced association) to maximize the network-wide utility that is a logarithmic function of long-term rates. In fact, these schemes can be well implemented in the practical scene since the users can introduce long-term rate constraints to guarantee their QoS requirements. Significantly, it is not the case for the most existing schemes. Considering that these formulated problems are in a nonlinear and mixed-integer form and hard to tackle, we try to develop centralized algorithms using Lagrange multiplier method and distributed algorithms using dual decomposition. Numerical results show that the balanced association significantly outperforms the unbalanced association on the load balancing gain, rate fairness, but the QoS guarantee. In addition, we also show the impacts of the number of massive antennas on the association performance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (973) under Grant Nos. 2012CB 316004, 2013CB336600, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 41402290, 61462028, 81460275, 61671144, 61372101, 61221002, National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863) under Grant Nos. 2014AA012104, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Open Research Fund of Key Lab of Broadband Wireless Communications and Sensor Network Technologies (NJUPT), Ministry of Education under Grant No. NYKL201502, Major Project for Natural Science Foundation of Jiangxi Province of China under Grant No. 20152ACB21011, and Funding of Supporting Excellent Young Professors for Teaching and Research in Southeast University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Engineering, East China Jiaotong University, Nanchang, China

    Tian-Qing Zhou & Nan Jiang

  2. School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China

    Dong Qin

  3. School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

    Chunguo Li

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  1. Tian-Qing Zhou
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Correspondence to Tian-Qing Zhou.

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Zhou, TQ., Jiang, N., Qin, D. et al. QoS-Aware Balanced and Unbalanced Associations in Massive MIMO Enabled Heterogeneous Cellular Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 97, 5345–5366 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-4782-2

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