User clustering for high-speed small cell backhaul over coaxial cable

Growing demand for fast Internet services has led to evolution of new industry standards for data services over coaxial cables. New coaxial cable standards, in addition to promising high speed residential broadband services, also present a viable low cost solution for small cell backhaul. The standards allow flexible resource management by allowing the customization of data transmission according to user channel characteristics. Users can be grouped together according to similarity in channel conditions and bit-loading profiles can be assigned independently to each group. This paper presents a joint grouping and profile assignment algorithm that gives strong data rate results with low implementation complexity. These high data rates make it possible for coaxial cable services to meet the demand of high capacity backhaul for small cells.