Multi-service load balancing in a heterogeneous network

In this paper, we investigate load balancing mechanisms in heterogeneous WiMAX/WLAN network. By taking both the service characteristics of the two networks and service requirements of two kinds of applications into consideration, we distribute all streaming applications to WiMAX with preemptive service priority. Then the remaining capacities of WiMAX and the entire capacity of WLAN are utilized for serving elastic applications. Accordingly, we proposed two size thresholds based on which elastic applications are dispatched to WiMAX or WLAN. Numerical results indicate that dispatching elastic applications with smaller size to WLAN performs fair well compared with other dispatching mechanisms. It is also found that the size distribution has significant impact on the performance of load balancing mechanisms.