Balanced Clustered Cell-Free Networking With Individual Rate Guarantees

Providing service quality guarantee is essential for mobile communication systems to ensure satisfactory user experience. Recently, clustered cell-free networking has been proposed to avoid the cell-edge problem in current cellular networks and uniformize the rate performance of users. Under the practical consideration of providing rate guarantee for each single user and reducing the system complexity as much as possible, this paper investigates the clustered cell-free networking problem with the objective of maximizing the number of subnetworks under the individual rate constraints and the balance constraints of subnetworks. Such an optimization problem is NP-hard to solve with the key challenge arising from the interdependence between the number of balance constraints and the optimization objective, i.e., the solution space varies with the objective function. To address this challenge, we convert the balance constraints into a single constraint, based on which the problem is solved via relaxation and a balanced and individual-rate-guaranteed (BIRG) clustered cell-free networking algorithm is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed BIRG algorithm can provide rate guarantee for each user as well as produce balanced subnetworks, and outperform the state-of-the-art benchmarks.