Autonomous Decentralized User Association Method to Maximize Integrated System Throughput for Multi-service Coexistence

In this paper, we propose an autonomous decentralized user association method that maximizes the integrated system throughput, which is defined across multiple services. The quality of service (QoS) of each service is defined by the system throughput, which takes into account the trade-off between spectrum efficiency and fairness among users for each service. Then, the total quality of all services is defined by the integrated system throughput, which is calculated by the weighted generalized average of the system throughput levels of each service. The proposed method achieves the optimal user association that maximizes the integrated system throughput according to the distribution of base stations (BSs) and users in the system coverage based only on a small amount of control information broadcasted by each BS through autonomous decentralized control of each user terminal. Computer simulations assuming a heterogeneous network show that the proposed method increases the system throughput of each service and integrated system throughput compared to the cell range expansion (CRE) method, which is widely used in 4G and 5G mobile communication systems.