Joint User Association and Resource Allocation in Small Cells with Limited Backhaul Capacity

Abstract

User association and resource allocation for downlink orthogonal frequency division multiplexing are jointly optimized in small cells networks with limited backhaul. In particular, per resource block resource allocation under the backhaul constraint is formulated in pursuit of maximizing proportional fairness, which leads to an integer problem requiring prohibitive computational complexity to solve. We propose two suboptimal methods to solve the problem with feasible complexity. The sum-rate and computational complexity of the two proposed schemes are evaluated via numerical simulations and mathematical analysis, respectively, showing the trade-off between the sum-rate and complexity.