In a heterogeneous wireless cellular network, each user may be covered by
multiple access points such as macro/pico/relay/femto base stations (BS). An
effective approach to maximize the sum utility (e.g., system throughput) in
such a network is to jointly optimize users' linear procoders as well as their
base station associations. In this paper we first show that this joint
optimization problem is NP-hard and thus is difficult to solve to global
optimality. To find a locally optimal solution, we formulate the problem as a
noncooperative game in which the users and the BSs both act as players. We
introduce a set of new utility functions for the players and show that every
Nash equilibrium (NE) of the resulting game is a stationary solution of the
original sum utility maximization problem. Moreover, we develop a best-response
type algorithm that allows the players to distributedly reach a NE of the game.
Simulation results show that the proposed distributed algorithm can effectively
relieve local BS congestion and simultaneously achieve high throughput and load
balancing in a heterogeneous network.

本文主要研究如何在异构无线网络中同时优化用户的线性协处理器以及其与基站关联的问题。研究表明，将该问题转化为非合作博弈论可以获得最佳结果，并介绍了一种分布式算法来实现较高的吞吐量和负载平衡。