Belief Propagation for Energy Efficiency Maximization in Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

In this article, we study an energy efficient management of two-tier heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) which consist of one macro base station (BS) and multiple micro base stations. This article presents a distributed user association algorithm that maximizes the network-wide energy efficiency (EE) in HetNets. A subset of BSs that support only a small number of users can be turned off to save the energy consumption. By turning off BSs in the HetNet and offloading serving users to adjacent active BSs, the network-wide energy consumption is minimized, while the sum throughput is maximized. To solve the problem efficiently, we introduce a new approach based on a message-passing framework and derive a distributed load balancing algorithm. The proposed method provides a very efficient solution with reduced computational complexity compared to existing schemes. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms other conventional load balancing strategies.