  The heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs) with device-to-device (D2D)
communications have been a promising solution to cost-efficient delivery of
high data rates. A key challenge in such D2D-enabled HCNs is how to design an
effective association scheme with D2D model selection for load balancing.
Moreover, the offloaded users and D2D receivers (RXs) would suffer strong
interference from BSs, especially from high-power BSs. Evidently, a good
association scheme should integrate with interference mitigation. Thus, we
first propose an effective resource partitioning strategy that can mitigate the
interference received by offloaded users from high-power BSs and the one
received by D2D RXs from BSs. Based on this, we then design a user association
scheme for load balancing, which jointly considers user association and D2D
model selection to maximize network-wide utility. Considering that the
formulated problem is in a nonlinear and mixted-integer form and hard to
tackle, we adopt a dual decomposition method to develop an efficient
distributed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme
provides a load balancing gain and a resource partitioning gain.
