Optimizing cell association in 5G and beyond networks: a modified load-aware biased technique

Cellular networks are moving towards increasing heterogeneity by deploying more small cells into macro base station (MBS) to meet rapidly growing traffic demands. To leverage the advantages of these small cells, mobile users should be offloaded onto small base stations (BSs), which will typically be lightly populated and can give a higher data rate by presenting the mobile users with many more channels than the MBS. Likewise, a more balanced cell association will lessen the pressure on the MBS, allowing it to serve its remaining users more effectively. This paper addresses the cell association challenge for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in terms of throughput and load-balancing for 5G and future generation networks. This problem is quite challenging because BSs have varying backhaul capacities and users have varying QoS needs. Most of the previous studies are based on reference signal received power (RSRP), signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) or its variants and most importantly majority of them are not load-aware. Therefore, a modified load-aware biased cell association scheme based on distance is proposed to attain better QoS provisioning in terms of throughput and load-balancing. Simulation results depict that the proposed load-aware-based method outperforms conventional cell association schemes based on RSRP and its variants, and in terms of throughput and load-balancing. Furthermore, the algorithm’s complexity has been assessed through a comparison and analysis of computational time, demonstrating better performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques.