An association approach that combines resource consumption and load balancing in heterogeneous cellular networks

With the rapidly increasing number of users and various internet of things applications, the capacity of current air interface of cellular networks has quickly become insufficient. Heterogeneous cellular network based IoT communications is an economical and effective way to increase network capacity and extend coverage area, which has been considered as a natural choice to address this problem. In heterogeneous cellular networks, the layout of homogeneous cellular networks (i.e. Homogeneous networks) has been changed by adding low-power nodes into macrocell. As a result, a new problem arises: mobile association among various serving nodes. In order to achieve excellent system performance, this problem should be well addressed. In this paper, we proposed a novel association approach which takes backhaul link, quality of service and resource consumption into consideration. A utility framework which is a function of spectrum efficiency and cell load is formulated. The approach not only improves spectrum efficiency in relay enhanced network but also maintains the load balancing between cells. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can provide higher system capacity and better load balancing.