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Traffic demand in wireless communication systems has emerged as a key issue over recent decades. An ever-increasing trend is projected for the next few years, with explosive data traffic expected to materialize and mobile users imposing new quality of service requirements. This growing traffic demand, combined with increasingly complex heterogeneous network (HetNet) scenarios, has presented ever more challenges for mobile network operators in terms of service, coverage, load balancing, and quality of service. Considering the traditional association mechanism based on maximum power received, HetNets tend to remain unbalanced, making it challenging to satisfy mobile users' traffic requirements. In this paper, instead of trying to maximize the achievable downlink rate per user, we couple the cell range expansion (CRE) technique with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to maximize the number …