On Criteria for Cell Association for Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

One of key technologies of 5G mobile networks is introducing small cells to supplement existing macrocells, and this results in heterogeneous networks. In this letter, we investigate criteria for cell association in heterogeneous networks, focusing on performance-oriented and fairness-oriented criteria. Through numerical evaluations, we reveal that employing the fairness-oriented criterion, i.e., maximizing the minimum throughput among users realizes both high throughput of whole networks and fair throughput sharing among users.