Dual-Connectivity Enabled Resource Allocation Approach With eICIC for Throughput Maximization in HetNets With Backhaul Constraint

By introducing the concept of dual connectivity (DC), joint user association and resource allocation for heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with backhaul constraint have been investigated. However, co-channel scenario is rarely considered in DC-enabled HetNets due to inter-tier interference. To solve this issue, enhanced intercell interference coordination (eICIC) via almost blank subframe (ABS) is introduced into DC-enabled HetNets with backhaul constraint. The objective is to improve overall system throughout while providing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees on user's rate. First, the joint DC-enabled user association and resource allocation problem is formulated as an mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Then, by linearizing the products of the variables, the original problem is reformulated into a linear problem. Last, a low-complexity heuristic method to achieve the near-optimal solution is proposed. Also, the numerical results show the superiority of our algorithm.