Performance Analysis of Backhaul‐Aware User Association in 5G Ultradense Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

In 5G ultradense heterogeneous networks, wireless backhaul, as one of the important base station (BS) resources that affect user services, has attracted more and more attention. However, a user would access to the BS which is the nearest for the user based on the conventional user association scheme, which constrains the network performance improvement due to the limited backhaul capacity. In this paper, using backhaul‐aware user association scheme, semiclosed expressions of network performance metrics are derived in ultradense heterogeneous networks, including coverage probability, rate coverage, and network delay. Specifically, all possible access and backhaul links within the user connectable range of BSs and anchor base stations (A‐BSs) are considered to minimize the analytical results of outage probability. The outage for the user occurs only when the access link or backhaul link which forms the link combination with the optimal performance is failure. Furthermore, the theoretical analysis and numerical results evaluate the impact of the fraction of A‐BSs and the BS‐to‐user density ratio on network performance metric to seek for a more reasonable deployment of BSs in the practical scenario. The simulation results show that the coverage probability of backhaul‐aware user association scheme is improved significantly by about 2× compared to that of the conventional user association scheme when backhaul is constrained.