Matching game for green uplink in hyper dense LTE HeTNets

In this paper, we aim to improve the energy efficiency of cellular users located in hyper-dense co-channel deployments of LTE small cell Networks (SCNs), randomly distributed within LTE macro cell networks (MCNs). Avoiding the severe cross-Tier interferences at the small base stations (SBSs) levels caused by the uplink transmissions between the macro indoor users (which are inside the SBS coverage area) and the macro base station (MBS), ensuring load balancing, and improving energy efficiency are critical technical challenges in hyper-dense co-channel LTE SCNs deployments. As a solution, we formulate our problem as a matching game, then we propose the deferred acceptance algorithm to compute the optimal stable matching consisting of assigning each macro indoor user to the most suitable SBS and vice versa. Simulation results validate our solution, and show how it can effectively improve the energy efficiency of cellular users in hyper-dense LTE HetNets compared to the default Max-SINR association scheme. © 2016 IEEE.