Outage-aware Matching Game Approach for Cell Selection in LTE/WLAN Multi-RAT HetNets

Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) which are consisting of multiple radio access technologies (Multi-RATs), offer a promising architecture for enhancing the mobile network capacity and improving the users’ quality of experience (QoE). However, the main challenge in such network architecture is the development of an efficient cell selection solution. In this paper, a distributed algorithm for the cell selection process is proposed to consider the impact of fast fading channel on the system performance. The cell selection process is formulated as an optimization problem, which is combinatorial, for minimizing the average outage probability and thus improving the system performance. Since there are many services that require a low outage probability, i.e. more sensitive to the system degradation, we are focusing in our paper on Long term evolution (LTE) wireless local area network (WLAN) aggregation (LWA) technology and how it may be used to enhance the outage performance of the system. Therefore, based on well-formulated utility functions for users and different stations in the multi-RAT HetNet, a matching game-based approach is proposed to provide a solution for the cell selection problem. Simulation results show the superiority of the proposed matching scheme compared to other cell selection schemes especially in terms of the achieved average outage probability with a very close performance to the optimal heuristic search solution. Also, the performance improvement as a result of deploying LWA stations in the network is shown. The reason for this improvement is that the aggregation enhances the achieved throughput significantly, which in turn improves the outage performance.