Reference power-based user association for cloud radio access networks

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is introduced as a promising network architecture to meet the ever-increasing mobile data traffic. Baseband processing is decoupled from the remote radio head (RRH) and centralized in a common resource pool in C-RAN architecture, which enables efficient resource allocation. In this paper, we study the user association problem in order to better utilize wireless resources of RRHs. The optimization objective is to maximize the fully satisfied users. We develop a reference power-based approximation algorithm. We prove that the proposed algorithm can achieve an approximation ratio of 1/2 to the formulated problem. Numerical results validate that the proposed user association strategy can utilize the wireless resources efficiently and effectively.