Delay-Oriented Oriented QoS-Aware QoS Aware User Association and Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
Abstract: To meet ever-growing growing mobile data traffic, network spatial densification with various low-power power nodes in addition to the conventional high--power macro base stations, also known as heterogeneous network (HetNet), is regarded as one key enabling solution. Due to the unplanned nature, HetNets are very irregular and severe interference can happen without judicious designs of the user association associa rules. Most prior works assumed best best-effort effort traffic and sought the optimal association to maximize metrics, such as the sum of log-rates. log rates. In the case of bursty traffic with quality-of-service quality service (QoS) requirements, existing association schemes cannot fully ly release the traffic offloading capabilities of HetNets. In this paper, we model the downlink traffic to individual mobile station explicitly. Aiming to minimize the network network-wide wide packet delay, we investigate the optimal user association scheme and the co corresponding rresponding resource allocation algorithm. We then propose the QoS-aware aware user association (QoSA) strategies of different flavors enjoying low complexity and guaranteed convergence. Furthermore, the proposed QoSA algorithms are readily implemented in distri distributed manners. Extensive network simulations are carried out to corroborate our designs.