User Demand Aware Soft-Association Control in Ultra-Dense Small Cell Networks

To address the challenge of unprecedented growth in mobile data traffic, ultra-dense network deployment is a cost efficient solution to offload the traffic over some small cells. The overlapped coverage areas of small cells create more than one candidate access points for one mobile station. Signal strength based user association in IEEE 802.11 results in a significantly unbalanced load distribution among access points. However, the bandwidth demand of each user actually differs vastly due to their different preferences on mobile applications. In this paper, we formulate a non-linear integer programming model for joint user association and user bandwidth demand guarantee problem. In this model, we try to maximize the system capacity and guarantee the effective bandwidth demand for each user by soft-association control. Finally, we evaluate the proposed algorithm performance for the edge users with dynamic and heterogeneous bandwidth demands. Simulation results show that the proposed soft-association control performs better than the distributed ones and improves the individual quality of user experience with a little price on system throughput.