Access Point Selection for Spectral Efficiency and Load Balancing Optimization in Radio Stripes

This work considers the uplink (UL) of a radio stripe (RS) network with two sequential equalization schemes: the optimal sequence linear processing (OSLP) and the sequential maximum ratio combining (MRC). An access point selection (APS) scheme is employed to provide an efficient AP-to-user equipment (UE) association that aims to enhance the network spectral efficiency (SE) and supply a balanced distribution of the APs’ load (load balance). A bi-objective optimization approach is developed to provide these trade-off solutions and is based on a meta-heuristic (MH) known as genetic algorithm (GA). It can be concluded that the bi-objective approach can provide APS solutions where the SE is counterbalanced with the corresponding APs’ load, leading to acceptable solutions in terms of SE with much lower APs’ involvement. Additionally, the APS scheme can be complemented with the low-complexity MRC since it exhibits low SE degradation when compared to the case with OSLP.