Antenna assignment and cell association for provisioning heterogeneous traffic over multi-base-station massive MIMO cellular networks

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2026

Abstract

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is a promising fifth-generation (5 G) wireless access mechanism which can flexibly assign different numbers of antennae to downlink transmissions so as to adjust the transmission rates. However, it remains challenging to employ such a mechanism to serve user equipments (UEs) which are located within different cells and may require distinct qualities of service (QoSs) and have distinct best effort (BE) traffic demands because all UEs’ transmitting antennae and channel conditions have to be considered simultaneously. In this work, we propose a novel scheme called hybrid antenna allocation (HAA). In our proposed scheme, given a base-station’s available antennae and all UEs’ traffic requirements and channel conditions, HAA can determine each UE’s serving base-station and assign the associated transmitting antennae in order to maximize (optimize) the system’s total utility subject to the fulfillment of the QoS demands. Besides, through the theoretical analysis, we prove that the aforementioned total-utility maximization problem is NP-complete. Furthermore, our proposed HAA method is a fast suboptimal solution, or a polynomial-time heuristic, which leads to a bounded performance deviation from the optimality. Our simulation results exhibit that the proposed HAA method can flexibly allocate antennae under various circumstances, while its performance is very close to the optimal solution.

Publication Title

Wireless Networks

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