Toward optimal remote radio head activation, user association, and power allocation in C-RANs using benders decomposition and ADMM

To satisfy the rapidly growing demands of wireless communications, new structures have been proposed for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication networks, such as cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), which have advantages including high energy efficiency, large network capacity, and high flexibility. This paper concentrates on the problem of remote radio head (RRH) activation, user association, and power allocation in C-RANs. To tackle the problem with $l-{0}$ norm, we transform it into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Instead of solving it by centralized solvers, we propose a novel algorithm based on Benders decomposition, which can obtain the optimal solution of the MINLP problem. To solve the primal problem in Benders decomposition efficiently, we adopt the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to achieve a parallel implementation. To further reduce the complexity of solving the MINLP problem, a distributed two-stage iterative algorithm combining the ADMM and the max-sum algorithm is also proposed. The simulation results demonstrate that the first proposed algorithm can obtain the optimal solution, and the second proposed algorithm outperforms conventional algorithms significantly.