Joint approach to beam optimization and user association

Efficiently managed user-cell association is important for self-optimization of communication networks. Edge user performance and fairness of the service quality can be improved by offloading heavily loaded cells to neighboring cells. In this paper, an algorithm for joint optimization of antenna parameters with load balancing is presented to distribute users to cells while optimizing the antenna parameters. The proposed approach does not only change the serving range of each cell but also re-assign users to cells for effective system capacity. The performance evaluations show that the presented approach increases the edge user capacity by 27% compared to conventional approach.