Characterisation of Pareto boundary for uplink small‐cell base stations allocation: a fast iterative algorithm

Abstract

In a densely deployed small-cell network, part of small-cell base stations (BSs) are activated to serve users while the rest are sleep to save energy. The uplink performance region is studied here for such network employing orthogonal frequency-division multiple access. The authors characterise the limit of performance region using the Pareto boundary. This boundary describes all achievable performance results of beamformers and power allocation. Enabling BS allocation increases the spatial degree of freedom by cooperative reception but greatly complicates searching boundary of performance region. To overcome the complexity challenge, a fast and customised iterative algorithm is developed to check if an arbitrary given performance target is feasible. Using the proposed feasibility checking, the authors can characterise the Pareto-optimal boundary of uplink performance with activated BS allocation. The authors further study two types of BS allocation schemes, namely the network-centric and user-centric strategies. Comparison of both strategies is illustrated in the authors’ numerical examples.