Joint Downlink Base Station Association and Power Control for Max-Min Fairness: Computation and Complexity

In a heterogeneous network (HetNet) with a large number of low power base stations (BSs), proper user-BS association and power control is crucial to achieving desirable system performance. In this paper, we systematically study the joint BS association and power allocation problem for a downlink cellular network under the max-min fairness criterion. First, we show that this problem is NP-hard. Second, we show that the upper bound of the optimal value can be easily computed, and propose a two-stage algorithm to find a high-quality suboptimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is near-optimal in the high-SNR regime. Third, we show that the problem under some additional mild assumptions can be solved to global optima in polynomial time by a semi-distributed algorithm. This result is based on a transformation of the original problem to an assignment problem with gains $\log(g_{ij})$, where $\{g_{ij}\}$ are the channel gains.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, a shorter version submitted to IEEE JSA

The role of asymptotic functions in network optimization and feasibility studies

Solutions to network optimization problems have greatly benefited from developments in nonlinear analysis, and, in particular, from developments in convex optimization. A key concept that has made convex and nonconvex analysis an important tool in science and engineering is the notion of asymptotic function, which is often hidden in many influential studies on nonlinear analysis and related fields. Therefore, we can also expect that asymptotic functions are deeply connected to many results in the wireless domain, even though they are rarely mentioned in the wireless literature. In this study, we show connections of this type. By doing so, we explain many properties of centralized and distributed solutions to wireless resource allocation problems within a unified framework, and we also generalize and unify existing approaches to feasibility analysis of network designs. In particular, we show sufficient and necessary conditions for mappings widely used in wireless communication problems (more precisely, the class of standard interference mappings) to have a fixed point. Furthermore, we derive fundamental bounds on the utility and the energy efficiency that can be achieved by solving a large family of max-min utility optimization problems in wireless networks.Comment: GlobalSIP 2017 (to appear

Joint Pilot Design and Uplink Power Allocation in Multi-Cell Massive MIMO Systems

This paper considers pilot design to mitigate pilot contamination and provide good service for everyone in multi-cell Massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. Instead of modeling the pilot design as a combinatorial assignment problem, as in prior works, we express the pilot signals using a pilot basis and treat the associated power coefficients as continuous optimization variables. We compute a lower bound on the uplink capacity for Rayleigh fading channels with maximum ratio detection that applies with arbitrary pilot signals. We further formulate the max-min fairness problem under power budget constraints, with the pilot signals and data powers as optimization variables. Because this optimization problem is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard due to signomial constraints, we then propose an algorithm to obtain a local optimum with polynomial complexity. Our framework serves as a benchmark for pilot design in scenarios with either ideal or non-ideal hardware. Numerical results manifest that the proposed optimization algorithms are close to the optimal solution obtained by exhaustive search for different pilot assignments and the new pilot structure and optimization bring large gains over the state-of-the-art suboptimal pilot design.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures. Accepted to publish at IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication