Joint Control of Autonomous Cell Association and Power Control for Heterogeneous Networks with Inter-Cell Interference Coordination

This paper proposes a joint control method for cell association and transmission power control of the pico base stations (BSs) in heterogeneous networks (HetNet) with inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC). The optimization criterion is proportionally fairness. The proposed method employs an iterative algorithm that alternately repeats the cell association for a given transmission power for all BSs and the transmission power control of the respective BSs for a given cell association for convergence. The proposed method assumes a decentralized approach and does not require inter-BS cooperation, which is an advantageous feature for real implementation. For cell association, we use our previously reported decentralized iterative cell association method, which achieves optimal cell association from the proportionally fairness viewpoint. The transmission power control step tries to increase the proportional fair metric taking into account the potential inter-cell interference. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves appropriate cell association and transmission power control for a given user distribution within the macrocell coverage area, which contributes to increasing the geometric mean user throughput.