User Association and Base Station Sleep Management in Dense Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Dense Heterogeneous Cellular Networks(HCNs) offer a promising approach to meet the target of 1000x increase in aggregate data rates in 5G wireless communication systems. However how to best utilize the available radio resources at densely deployed small cells remains an open problem as those small cells are typically unplanned. In this paper we focus on balancing loads across macro cells and small cells by offloading users to small cells, as well as dynamically switching off underutilized small cells. We propose a joint user association and base station(BS) sleep mangement(UA-BSM) scheme that proactively offloads users to a fraction of the densely deployed small cells. We propose a heuristic algorithm that iteratively solves the user association problem and puts BSs with low loads into sleep. An interference relation matrix(IRM) is constructed to help us identify the candidate BSs that can be put into sleep. User associations are then aggregated to selected small cells that remain active. Simulation results show that our proposed approach achieves load balancing across macro and small cells and reduces the number of active BSs. Numerical results show user signal to interference ratio(SINR) can be improved by small cell sleep control.