Adaptive Cell Association and Interference Management in LTE-A Small-Cell Networks

This paper is concerned with user association and inter-cell interference in co-channel Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) small-cell networks (SCNs) in which the transmit nodes of control plane and data plane are separated. We propose a novel algorithm to associate users to one of the small-cells, while maximizing the sum utility of average achievable rates within one macro-cell. Moreover, small-cell group muting (SCGM) is used to mitigate the inter-cell interference among adjacent small-cells. Numerical simulation results in an LTE-A simulator show that the adaptive cell association and SCGM schemes clearly outperform currently used methods in terms of macro-cell average and cell-edge throughput.