  This paper studies the problem of self-organizing heterogeneous LTE systems.
We propose a model that jointly considers several important characteristics of
heterogeneous LTE system, including the usage of orthogonal frequency division
multiple access (OFDMA), the frequency-selective fading for each link, the
interference among different links, and the different transmission capabilities
of different types of base stations. We also consider the cost of energy by
taking into account the power consumption, including that for wireless
transmission and that for operation, of base stations and the price of energy.
Based on this model, we aim to propose a distributed protocol that improves the
spectrum efficiency of the system, which is measured in terms of the weighted
proportional fairness among the throughputs of clients, and reduces the cost of
energy. We identify that there are several important components involved in
this problem. We propose distributed strategies for each of these components.
Each of the proposed strategies requires small computational and
communicational overheads. Moreover, the interactions between components are
also considered in the proposed strategies. Hence, these strategies result in a
solution that jointly considers all factors of heterogeneous LTE systems.
Simulation results also show that our proposed strategies achieve much better
performance than existing ones.
