Competitive cell association and antenna allocation in 5G massive MIMO networks

Massive MIMO will be one of the technologies adopted in 5G cellular networks due to its ability to enhance transmission performance. However, resource management issues remain unsolved, especially with quality of service (QoS) requirements from users. This paper focuses on cell association and antenna allocation problems in such networks. We analyze the competitive situations where users in different classes with different QoS (i.e., data rate) requirement can choose to associate with any cell rationally and independently. Likewise, access points can allocate their antennas to different users. The users and access points are self-interested to maximize their own benefits in terms of data rate and total revenue, respectively. We formulate a hierarchical evolutionary game framework which is composed of the games for cell association and antenna allocation. We apply both deterministic and stochastic approaches to obtain the equilibrium solutions of the game.