Unified approach to joint power allocation and base assignment in nonorthogonal networks

In this paper, we consider the joint power allocation and base station (BS) assignment in nonorthogonal downlink transmission code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communication systems. In addition to the popular sum-power criterion, we introduce three novel criteria that better take into account the network requirements and particularly the separate power limit of each of the BSs. In our model, we allow each user to be connected to more than one BS and show that such a scheme can improve the system capacity (while currently this mechanism is only used to support soft handoff). Nevertheless, we show that in any optimal solution, the actual number of connections used by each user is small. We propose a unified approach to optimization, which allows the use of linear programming (LP)-based iterative algorithms to solve all of the presented optimization problems. The proposed scheme is verified by simulations for several scenarios. The simulation results show that by taking into account the power constraints of each of the BSs, the system capacity can be increased by up to 33%. The results can also approximate the performance of orthogonal CDMA networks with precision that increases with system bandwidth.