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Energy and Spectrum Efficient User Association for Backhaul Load Balancing in Small Cell Networks

Macro base stations are densely overlaid by small cells to satisfy the demands of user equipment in heterogeneous networks. Due to their dense deployment, some small cells are not directly connected to macro base stations and thus backhaul connections are required to connect small cells to macro base stations. Millimeter wave backhauls which have high bandwidths are preferred for small cell backhaul communication, since they can increase the capacity of network considerably. In this context, association of user equipment to base stations becomes challenging due to the backhaul architecture. Considering environmental concerns, energy efficiency is a vital criterion in designing user association algorithms. In this paper, we study the user association problem aiming at the maximization of energy efficiency. We develop centralized and distributed user association algorithms based on sequentially minimizing the power consumption. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms under two scenarios and show that they achieve higher energy efficiency compared to the existing algorithms in the literature, while maintaining high spectral efficiency and backhaul load balancing.