Cell Selection Algorithm Based on Competition of Users in Hierarchical Cellular Networks

One of the important issues in hierarchical cellular networks is to assign a user to a proper cell. If the user is located in the overlapping area of a macrocell and a microcell, both cells can be candidates as a serving cell. Thus, a cell selection should be carefully performed to increase performance in view of users as well as networks. In this paper, we propose a cell selection algorithm based on competition among a group of users. Through the competition, each user in the group decides its serving cell that causes the reduction of total transmit power required to achieve a given target SINR. Simulation results show that a proposed algorithm has performance improvement in terms of the maximum number of supportable users compared with a conventional algorithm, in which a user is assigned to a cell that requires smaller transmit power to achieve the target SINR.