Joint Cell Association and User Scheduling in Carrier Aggregated Heterogeneous Networks

This paper focuses on the network capacity maximization problem through joint cell association and user scheduling with multiple carrier aggregation (CA) in the heterogeneous networks (HetNets). For the downlink transmission, the proposed joint maximization problem is reformulated from single data flow into multiple data flow through carrier aggregated HetNets, in which the users could associate with BSs on more than one carrier band. Such a flexible joint maximization problem could be solved by convex optimization solutions with reasonable complexity. Numerical analysis has confirmed the performance advantages of the proposed multi-flow solution under different carrier aggregation deployment.