Small Base Station Association and Cooperative Receiver Design for HetNets via Distributed SOCP

Abstract

How to determine the right number of small base stations to activate in multi-cell uplinks to match traffic from a fixed quantity of K users is an open question. This paper analyses the uplink cooperative that jointly receives base stations activation to explore this question. This paper is different from existing works only consider transmitting power as optimization objective function. The global objective function is formulated as a summation of two terms: transmitting power for data and coordinated overhead for control. Then, the joint base stations activation and beamforming problem is formulated as a mixed integer second order cone optimization. To solve this problem, we develop two polynomial-time distributed methods. Method one is a two-stage solution which activates no more than K small base stations (SBSs). Method two is a heuristic algorithm by dual decomposition to MI-SOCP that activates more SBSs to obtain multiple-antennae diversity gains. Thanks to the parallel computation for each node, our methods are more computationally efficient. The strengths and weaknesses of these two proposed two algorithms are also compared using numerical results.