Distributed Power Allocations in Heterogeneous Networks With Dual Connectivity Using Backhaul State Information

Abstract

Long Term Evolution (LTE) release 12 proposes the use of dual connectivity in heterogeneous cellular networks, where a user equipment (UE) maintains parallel connections to a macrocell base station and to a low-tier node such as a picocell base station or relay. In this paper, we propose distributed multi-objective power control where each UE independently adapts its transmit power on its dual connections, where the uplinks could be of unequal bandwidth and have non-ideal backhaul links. In the proposed optimization, the UEs dynamically switch between data rate maximization and transmit power minimization as the backhaul load varies. To address the coupling between interference and the backhaul load, we propose a low-overhead convergence mechanism which does not require explicit coordination between UEs and also derive a closed-form expression of the transmit power levels at equilibrium. Simulation results show that our scheme achieves higher aggregate end-to-end data rate and significant power saving in comparison to a scheme that employs a greedy algorithm and a scheme that employs only waterfilling.