Distributed Load-Balancing in a Multi-Carrier Wireless System

We consider a cellular network or a wireless local area network (WLAN), deployed with attachment points (APs) capable of transmission and reception in multiple radio- frequency (RF) carriers. A major factor contributing to the efficiency and stability of the network is the mechanism determining the connection of terminals to the appropriate AP and the RF carrier. This paper describes a practical, distributed, network-assisted and terminal-driven mechanism to determine the connections for load-balancing among the available RF carriers. The mechanism is based on a metric that we term as the service level indicating metric (SLIM). We extend the notion of SLIM to cases where Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters are specified and propose a load-balancing mechanism for such cases. We demonstrate the near-optimality of the proposed mechanisms through 3GPP based simulations.