Energy-Efficient User Association with Open Loop Power Control for Uplink Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Energy reduction for wireless systems becomes more and more important due to its impact on the operation cost and global carbon footprint. In this paper, we investigate three kinds of energy-efficient association schemes under open loop power control for uplink heterogeneous cellular networks, which are formulated as a whole energy efficiency maximization problem, a sum energy efficiency maximization problem and a utility maximization problem respectively. The third case takes account of load balancing level and user fairness in the energy-efficient association. Considering that the first problem is in a fractional mixed-integer form, we introduce an energy efficiency parameter to convert it into a parametric subtractive form, and then design an effective iterative algorithm to achieve the optimal solutions. As for the third problem, we first introduce a dual variable to decouple the constraint and then develop a distributed algorithm using dual decomposition. In addition, we also give the convergence proofs for the proposed algorithms. In order to confirm the effectiveness of energy-efficient user association algorithms, we introduce other association rules for comparison, and investigate the influences of different parameters on the association performance of these association rules. Keywords—Heterogeneous cellular networks, user association, power control, energy efficiency.