On the joint impact of bias and power control on downlink spectral efficiency in cellular networks

Cell biasing and downlink transmit power are two controls that may be used to improve the spectral efficiency of cellular networks. With cell biasing, each mobile user associates with the base station offering, say, the highest biased signal to interference plus noise ratio. Biasing affects the cell association decisions of mobile users, but not the received instantaneous downlink transmission rates. Adjusting the collection of downlink transmission powers can likewise affect the cell associations, but in contrast with biasing, it also directly affects the instantaneous rates. This paper investigates the joint use of both cell biasing and transmission power control and their (individual and joint) effects on the statistical properties of the collection of per-user spectral efficiencies. Our analytical results and numerical investigations demonstrate in some cases a significant performance improvement in the Pareto efficient frontiers of both a mean-variance and throughput-fairness tradeoff from using both bias and power controls over using either control alone.