Distributed Load Balancing through Self Organisation of cell size in cellular systems

Abstract

Uneven traffic load among the cells increases call blocking rates in some cells and causes low resource utilisation in other cells and thus degrades user satisfaction and overall performance of the cellular system. Various centralised or semi centralised Load Balancing (LB) schemes have been proposed to cope with this time persistent problem, however, a fully distributed Self Organising (SO) LB solution is still needed for the future cellular networks. To this end, we present a novel distributed LB solution based on an analytical framework developed on the principles of nature inspired SO systems. A novel concept of super-cell is proposed to decompose the problem of "system-wide blocking minimization" into the local sub-problems in order to enable a SO distributed solution. Performance of the proposed solution is evaluated through system level simulations for both macro cell and femto cell based systems. Numerical results show that the proposed solution can reduce the blocking in the system close to an Ideal Central Control (ICC) based LB solution. The added advantage of the proposed solution is that it does not require heavy signalling overheads.