Ziye Ma’s research while affiliated with Northeastern University (Shenyang, China) and other places

A novel multi-stream carrier aggregation (MSCA) enabled coordinated multi-point (CoMP) framework in heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) is proposed. Our objective is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the proposed framework by jointly optimizing base station (BS) clustering, user association, sub-carrier assignment and power allocation. The formulated problem is proved to be NP-hard. By analyzing the structure of the original problem, we decouple it into power allocation sub-problem and sub-carrier assignment sub-problem. For the power allocation sub-problem, we propose sequential minimization technique and Zoutendijk feasible direction method to find the optimal power allocation with fixed sub-carrier assignment. For the sub-carrier assignment sub-problem, we propose genetic algorithm (GA) to represent the BS clustering and sub-carrier assignment, and design two GA based joint optimization frameworks. One is using the power allocation algorithm for fitness evaluation and guiding the evolution of GA. Another is optimizing these two sub-problems in an iterative manner, whereas the optimal sub-carrier assignment is updated timely as any change of the power allocation. Numerical results validate the feasibility, fast convergence, and flexibility of the proposed algorithm, \textcolor{red}{and is superior to conventional MSCA or CoMP enabled HetNets.