Cell Associations that Maximize the Average Uplink-Downlink Degrees of Freedom

Abstract: We study the problem of associating mobile terminals to base stations in a linear interference network, with the goal of maximizing the average rate achieved over both the uplink and downlink sessions. The cell association decision is made at a centralized cloud level, with access to global network topology information. More specifically, given the constraint that each mobile terminal can be associated to a maximum of N base stations at once, we characterize the maximum achievable pre-log factor (degrees of freedom) and the corresponding cell association pattern. Interestingly, the result indicates that for the case where N > 1, the optimal cell association guarantees the achievability of the maximum uplink rate even when optimizing for the uplink alone, and for the case where N=1, the optimal cell association is that of the downlink. Hence, this work draws attention to the question of characterizing network topologies for which the problem can be simplified by optimizing only for the uplink or only for the downlink.