A Delay and Traffic Balancing Sensitive Scheme for User Association in Limited Fronthaul H-CRAN s

Abstract

In order to fully exploit the potentials of the heterogeneous cloud radio access networks (H-CRANs), how to associate the user equipments (UEs) with the appropriate low power nodes (LPNs) is a very essential problem. However, when the fronthaul constraint is limited, the UEs are sensitive to delay, and the LPNs are concerned about the traffic balancing, such a problem has not gained enough attention. In this paper, the aforementioned user association problem is investigated and formulated as a bidirectional matching game, where the UEs are seeking to access the most preferred LPN while the LPNs are seeking to accept the most preferred UEs. To find the solution to the proposed game, an iteration algorithm is proposed, and its computational complexity and convergence are proved as well. Simulation results show that our proposed user association scheme is effective and outperforms the existing schemes-in terms of achieved data rates, delay, traffic balancing and overall utility.