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Ultradense heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are emerging as an inevitable approach to tackle the capacity crunch in cellular networks. However, imbalanced load among small and macrocells and poor resource utilization as a consequence in HetNets remains a long-standing problem. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a solution for maximization of coverage and capacity while minimizing load imbalance among macro and small cells. Most recent studies on the topic focus on either optimization of coverage, capacity or load, or a combination of two of these three intertwined objectives. We formulate the optimization problem as a function of two hard parameters namely antenna tilt and transmit power, and a soft parameter, cell individual offset, that affect the coverage, capacity, and load directly. The resulting solution is a combination of the otherwise conflicting coverage and capacity optimization (CCO) and load balancing (LB) self-organizing network (SON) functions. In the presented joint CCO-LB solution, a conflict free operation of CCO and LB is ensured by designing a novel load aware user association methodology and resolving the effects of shadowing on coverage probability using stochastic approximation. The problem is proven to be nonconvex and is solved using genetic algorithm, sequential quadratic programming, and pattern search algorithms. The proposed CCO-LB solution is compared against two recently proposed CCO and CCO-LB solutions in the literature. Results show that the proposed solution can yield significant gain in terms of throughput, spectral efficiency, and load distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates transmit antenna selection for linearly precoded multiuser multiple-input–multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. First, in some precoded single-user MIMO systems, using all transmit antennas does not always lead to the best performance due to ill-conditioned channel matrices. This condition motivates us to investigate whether a similar result can be obtained in MU-MIMO systems. Based on the derived analytical results, we found that, for a given number of transmit antennas, decreasing the number of active transmit antennas [number of radio frequency (RF) units] always degrades system performance in the linearly precoded MU-MIMO systems. However, in practical systems, RF units are expensive. To reduce the hardware cost, antenna selection is usually used to reduce the number of RF units. Thus, we further analyze the performance loss due to transmit antenna selection (TAS). These analytical results provide good design references for using TAS in practical systems. Moreover, based on the analytical results, we proposed several simple TAS algorithms for linearly precoded MU-MIMO systems. Complexity analysis and simulation results show that the computational complexity of the proposed algorithms can significantly be reduced, whereas the performance is still comparable with the optimal selection scheme. As a result, the analyzed results enable us to better understand how TAS affects the MU-MIMO systems. In addition, the proposed algorithms make TAS more feasible to be used in practical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]