Maximizing Fairness for Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous 5G Networks

In this article, we first formulate the joint resource allocation, interference minimization, user-level, and cell-level fairness for maximum resource reuse in 5G heterogeneous small cell networks as an NP-hard problem. We then propose three algorithms-centralized, distributed, and randomized distributed algorithms-to efficiently solve the formulated resource allocation problem while minimizing interference, maximizing fairness, and resource reuse. Through extensive real data analysis and network simulations, we show that our proposed solutions outperform state-of-the-art schemes, namely interfering model (INT) and distributed random access (DRA), for both low and high-density 5G networks.