Dual connectivity in backhaul-limited massive-MIMO HetNets: User association and power allocation

With dual connectivity, a mobile user can be served by a macro base station (MBS) and a pico base station (PBS) simultaneously. In this paper, we address the problem of optimizing user-PBS association and power allocation in the uplink such that the network can serve the users’ demand at the minimum cost, where the PBSs are subject to backhaul capacity limitations and minimum rate requirements of users. We show that this non-convex problem can be formulated as a signomial geometric programming (SGP) whose solution can be found by solving a series of geometric programming (GP) problems. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate traffic offloading trend to PBSs for different cost and backhaul capacity settings, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed iterative algorithm. They also show that the output of the proposed algorithm closely matches the global optimal solution with affordable complexity.