Backhaul-aware joint traffic offloading and time fraction allocation for 5G HetNets

In fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are used to improve capacity and users' densification. However, to rapidly deploy a large number of femto base stations (BSs) in a cost-efficient manner, they should be connected to the core network through residential broadband links. As such, different femto BSs may have different backhaul capacities, which should be taken into consideration when macro BSs offload traffic to femto BSs. Furthermore, users offloaded to femto BSs can be severely interfered by the macro BSs if macro and femto BSs transmit at the same time in the downlink. This interference can be avoided by proper transmission time scheduling. In view of the problem, this paper proposes a novel scheme to jointly perform traffic offloading and time fraction allocation (TOTFA) to ensure proportional fairness in throughput among the users. The proposed scheme, called TOTFA maximizes the weighted sum of the logarithm of user throughput, subject to constraints imposed by the backhaul capacity. Simulation results show that TOTFA can improve aggregated throughput up to 100% compared with a baseline scheme when the backhaul link capacity is 1.25 Mb/s. Over a range of different backhaul capacities, the average throughput improvement is 45%.