Abstract
The growing concern on the exposure of users to the electromagnetic field (EMF) has recently brought new challenges to the mobile research community. In this letter, we propose a novel cell association framework for heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), which aims to balance the load amongst heterogeneous cells so as to improve the resource usage and to increase the user satisfaction in terms of both data rate and EMF exposure. We model the cell selection problem as a General Assignment Problem (GAP) and we present two heuristic algorithms, which solve it with limited complexity. Our analysis shows that the proposed solutions lead to notable improvements with respect to legacy association schemes.
Highlights
Driven by the exponential increase of the mobile traffic, the wireless community has investigated solutions for enhancing the resource usage efficiency to improve the overall network performance
We assess the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, which attempt to limit the Exposure Index (EI) while considering the side constraint of maximizing the user satisfaction
We compare their performance with respect to the approach where each User Equipment (UE) is served by the enhanced NodeB (eNB) associated with the strongest Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and the scheme where each UE is associated with the closest eNB (Min Path Loss)
Summary
Driven by the exponential increase of the mobile traffic, the wireless community has investigated solutions for enhancing the resource usage efficiency to improve the overall network performance. One of the most specific features of the EI is that it does focus on the downlink (DL) exposure It is usually neglected, the uplink (UL) has a rather relevant impact on the overall exposure. To deal with part of these problems, a Cell Range Expansion (CRE) can be used, where a positive bias is added to the strength of the small cell control signal This approach, jointly with interference coordination schemes, which protect range expanded UEs from MeNB interference, results in improved fairness and capacity [4]. We present two user centric mechanisms that jointly reduce the EMF exposure induced by the UL and improve the user satisfaction in terms of the DL throughput goal; last, considering the system perspective, the proposed solutions distribute the load in the HetNet to enhance the (access/backhaul) network utilization efficiency
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