Hybrid Controlled User Association and Resource Management for Energy-Efficient Green RANs with Limited Fronthaul

To alleviate green house effect, high network energy efficiency (EE) has increasingly become an important research target in wireless green communications. Therefore, the investigation for resource management to mitigate the co-tier interference in the small cell network (SCN) is provided. Moreover, with the merits of cloud radio access network (C-RAN), small cell base stations (SBSs) can be decomposed of a central small cell (CSC) and remote small cells (RSCs). To achieve the coordination, the split medium access control (MAC) based functional splitting is adopted with scheduler deployed at CSCs and retransmission functions left at RSCs. However, limited fronthaul has a compelling impact at RSCs due to requirements of user quality-of-service (QoS). Accordingly, a traffic control-based user association and resource allocation (TURA) scheme is proposed for a centralized resource management. To deal with the infeasibility to control all RSCs by CSC, we propose a hybrid controlled user and resource management (HARM) scheme. A CSC performs TURA for RSCs to mitigate intra-group interference within localized C-RANs, whereas the CSCs among separate C-RANs conduct cooperative resource competition (CRC) game for alleviating inter-group interference. Based on regret-based learning algorithm, the proposed schemes are analytically proved to reach the correlated equilibrium (CE). Simulation results have validated the effect of traffic control in TURA scheme and the convergence of CRC. Moreover, the comparison of the proposed TURA, HARM, and CRC schemes with the benchmark is revealed. It is observed that the TURA scheme outperforms the other schemes under ideal fronthaul control, whilst the proposed HARM scheme can sustain EE performance considering feasible implementation.