Joint User Association and Resource Allocation in the Uplink of Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract: This letter considers the problem of joint user association (UA), sub-channel assignment, antenna selection (AS), and power control in the uplink (UL) of a heterogeneous network such that the data rate of small cell users can be maximized while the macro-cell users are protected by imposing a threshold on the cross-tier interference. The considered problem is a non-convex mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP). To tackle the problem, we decompose the original problem into two sub-problems: (i) joint UA, sub-channel assignment, and AS, and (ii) power control. Then, we iteratively solve the subproblems by applying the tools from majorization-minimization (MM) theory and augmented Lagrange method, respectively, and obtain locally optimal solutions for each sub-problem. Simulation results illustrate that our proposed scheme outperforms existing schemes. Complexity analysis of the proposed algorithm is also presented.