Joint Optimization of Base Station Activation and User Association in Ultra Dense Networks Under Traffic Uncertainty

In ultra-dense networks (UDNs), the dense deployment of base stations (BSs) is facing challenges due to the pronounced unbalanced traffic loads, severe inter-cell interference, and uncertain traffic demands. In this paper, we tame traffic uncertainty for the joint optimization of BS activation and user association in UDNs to mitigate interference and balance traffic loads among BSs. Specifically, we address the traffic uncertainty by using chance constraint programming with the known first- and second-order statistics of the uncertain traffic. We formulate the joint BS activation and user association problem as a mixed integer non-linear programming problem, which is then decomposed into a set of user association sub-problems by modeling the BS states (active or idle) as a Markov chain. We solve the user association sub-problem at each BS state by transforming it into a convex problem over the positive orthant. In particular, at each BS state, the candidate serving BSs that lead to the optimal load balancing performance are identified for each user and parts of the user’s traffic are offloaded to the identified BSs. Based on the obtained solutions, we propose a distributed near-optimal BS activation and user association scheme. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is more robust to traffic uncertainty and provides better load-balancing performance than the existing schemes.