Base station activation and linear transceiver design for utility maximization in Heterogeneous networks

In a densely deployed Heterogeneous network (HetNet), the number of pico/micro base stations (BS) can be comparable or more than the number of the users. To reduce the operational overhead of the HetNet, selection of serving BSs becomes an important design issue. In this work, we propose to jointly optimize the transceiver and active BSs to trade off the overall spectrum efficiency with the operational overhead. We formulate this problem as a regularized sum rate maximization problem and solve it using sparse optimization techniques. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a local optimal solution. The efficiency and the efficacy of the algorithm are demonstrated via realistic numerical simulations.