Maintaining multiple wireless connections is a promising solution to boostcapacity in fifth-generation (5G) networks, where user equipment is able toconsume radio resources of several serving cells simultaneously and potentiallyaggregate bandwidth across all of them. The emerging dual connectivity paradigmcan be regarded as an attractive access mechanism in dense heterogeneous 5Gnetworks, where bandwidth sharing and cooperative techniques are evolving tomeet the increased capacity requirements. Dual connectivity in the uplinkremained highly controversial, since the user device has a limited power budgetto share between two different access points, especially when located close tothe cell edge. On the other hand, in an attempt to enhance the uplinkcommunications performance, the concept of uplink and downlink decoupling hasrecently been introduced. Leveraging these latest developments, our worksignificantly advances prior art by proposing and investigating the concept offlexible cell association in dual connectivity scenarios, where users are ableto aggregate resources from more than one serving cell. In this setup, thepreferred association policies for the uplink may differ from those for thedownlink, thereby allowing for a truly decoupled access. With the use ofstochastic geometry, the dual connectivity association regions for decoupledaccess are derived and the resultant performance is evaluated in terms ofcapacity gains over the conventional downlink received power access policies.
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