Backhaul-Aware User Association and Resource Allocation for Energy-Constrained HetNets

Growing attention has been paid to renewable- or hybrid-energy-powered heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In this paper, focusing on backhaul-aware joint user association and resource allocation for this type of HetNets, we formulate an online optimization problem to maximize the network utility reflecting proportional fairness. Since user association and resource allocation are tightly coupled not only on resource consumption of the base stations (BSs) but in the constraints of their available energy and backhaul as well, the closed-form solution is quite difficult to obtain. Thus, we solve the problem distributively by employing certain decomposition methods. Specifically, at first, by adopting the primal decomposition method, we decompose the original problem into a lower level resource-allocation problem for each BS and a higher level user-association problem. For the optimal resource allocation, we prove that a BS either assigns equal normalized resources or provides an equal long-term service rate to its served users. Then, the user-association problem is solved by the Lagrange dual decomposition method, and a completely distributed algorithm is developed. Moreover, applying results of the subgradient method, we demonstrate the convergence of the proposed distributed algorithm. Furthermore, to efficiently and reliably apply the proposed algorithm to the future wireless networks with an extremely dense BS deployment, we design a virtual user association and resource allocation scheme based on the software-defined networking architecture. Finally, numerical results validate the convergence of the proposed algorithm and the significant improvement on network utility, load balancing, and user fairness.