Energy-Efficient User Association and Resource Allocation for Multistream Carrier Aggregation

Multistream carrier aggregation (MSCA) is a promising technique to boost data rates by enabling users to connect with multiple base stations (BSs) simultaneously. In this paper, we investigate joint user association and resource allocation for MSCA systems to achieve energy efficiency (EE) balance among different BSs. We aim at maximizing the weighted summation of EE values for different BSs, which is modeled as a nonconvex combinatorial sum-of-ratios optimization problem. To develop an upper bound algorithm, we first relax the combinatorial variables and then transform the problem into a series of convex optimization problems by the successive convex approximation (SCA) method. We also propose a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm, which divides the original optimization problem into two steps: user association and channel allocation, as well as power allocation. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve flexible EE tradeoff among BSs, and the EE can be significantly improved with MSCA.