Joint User Association and Resource Allocation in CoMP-Enabled Heterogeneous CRAN

In this paper, we consider jointly optimizing user association, resource allocation and power allocation in a two tier heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN). Our objective is to utilize all the network resources in the most efficient way to maximize the network average throughput, while keeping some constraints such as the quality of service (QoS), interference protection to the devices associated with the Macro remote radio head (RRH), and fronthaul capacity. In our system, we propose using coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmissions to utilize any excess resources to maximize the network performance. In contrast to the literature, in which CoMP is usually used only to support edge users. We divide our joint problem into three sub-problems: user association, radio resource allocation, and power allocation. We propose matching game based low complexity algorithms to tackle the first two subproblems. For the power allocation sub-problem, we propose a novel technique to convexity the non-convex original problem to obtain the optimal solution. Given the conducted simulations, our proposed algorithms proved to enhance the network average weighted sum rate significantly, compared to the state of the art algorithms in the literature.