Interference-aware User Association under Cell Sleeping for Heterogeneous Cloud Cellular Networks

In this letter, we investigate an interference-aware user association scheme with cell sleeping technique in heterogeneous cloud cellular networks where the operation state of each base station (BS) is controlled by a cloud computing center. A user association problem which maximizes the user aggregate utility is formulated. Due to high computational complexity of the traversal method, we propose a distributed heuristic algorithm to get the suboptimal solution. At each cycle, the user selects the best BS by imposing a price which is proportional to the interference the BS provides. The BSs without any associated user will be switched off. Based on the varying network topologies, different combinations of active and switch-off BSs can also be obtained during different cycles. Numerical simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can achieve remarkable throughput gains under the same power consumption, especially in large scale networks.