A many-to-many matching game in ultra-dense LTE HetNets

In this work, we focus our study to improving the energy efficiency of mobile cellular users in ultra-dense LTE HetNets. The hyper-dense co-channel deployment of indoor LTE small cell networks (SCNs) within LTE macro cell networks (MCNs) will aggravate the effect of cross-tier interferences caused by the uplink transmissions of macro-indoor users located inside the overlapping zones of small base station (SBS) coverage areas. Hence, degrading the uplink performance at the level of SBSs adopting closed access policy. In order to eliminate the severe cross-tier interferences, each SBS attempts to open the access for macro-indoor users that accept only the SBS with Max-SINR offer. This will lead to network congestion problems in several SCNs. Wherefore, we formulate our problem as a many-to-many matching game. Then, we introduce an algorithm that computes the optimal many-to-many stable matching which consist of assigning each macro-indoor user with multi-homing capabilities to the most suitable set of SBSs and vice versa based on their preference profiles. With regard to the conventional Max-SINR association scheme, our solution can effectively improve the energy efficiency of cellular users. Moreover, it can ensure load balancing in ultra-dense LTE HetNets. © 2017 IEEE.