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Proportional Fairness through Dual Connectivity in Heterogeneous Networks

Proportional Fair (PF) is a scheduling technique to maintain a balance between maximizing throughput and ensuring fairness to users. Dual Connectivity (DC) technique was introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to improve the mobility robustness and system capacity in heterogeneous networks. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of DC in improving proportional fairness in the system. We propose a low complexity centralized PF scheduling scheme for DC and show that it outperforms the standard PF scheduling scheme. Since the problem of dual association of users for maximizing proportional fairness in the system is NP-hard, we propose three heuristic user association schemes for DC. We demonstrate that DC, along with the proposed PF scheme, gives remarkable gains on PF utility over single connectivity and performs almost close to the optimal PF scheme in heterogeneous networks.