Joint Resource Allocation and User Association for Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Networks

Cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) have been regarded as a promising architecture for energy-efficient fifth generation systems. In this paper, a new joint remote radio head (RRH) activation, user-RRH pairing and resource allocation strategy is proposed for heterogeneous C-RANs (H-CRANs). We first formulate an optimization problem to maximize the energy efficiency of H-CRANs. Then, a low-complexity suboptimal solution is developed. Our proposed mechanism consists of three key procedures: 1) RRH activation is performed based on greedy RRH selection, 2) user-RRH pairing is performed based on the channel quality, 3) the resource allocation problem is solved by dual decomposition. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can improve energy efficiency significantly.