Uplink Performance Improvement for Downlink-Uplink Decoupled HetNets With Non-Uniform User Distribution

In the heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the downlink-uplink decoupled (DUDE) user association is a very promising technology that can employ different association strategies for uplink and downlink. The DUDE mode has great potential for improving system capacity and frequency efficiency. However, interference between the DUDE user equipment (DUDE UE), macro user equipment (MUE) and small user equipment (SUE) still needs to be considered and properly tackled. Therefore, this paper presents an optimization scheme of frequency allocation and power control to improve the communication quality of users. Firstly, the multiple region frequency allocation (MRFA) scheme is proposed for non-uniform user distribution to alleviate interference among users and allocate spectrum resources equally to dense users. This scheme is modelled as a sub-region partition problem with maximum sum rate, which can disperse densely distributed users to different sub-bands for transmission. Secondly, the convergent power control (CPC) algorithm is considered to improve the transmission performance of each user. It can converge the transmit power to the optimal transmit power for reducing interference among co-channel users when there is no disturbance in the network. The CPC algorithm can also make the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) of each active user always greater than the target threshold until the end of communication by dynamically adjusting the transmit power of users. Simulation results show that the joint scheme of MRFA and CPC achieves a higher system throughput and better user performance than existing frequency allocation schemes or power control schemes.