Advanced load balancing in LTE/LTE-A cellular network

Due to the nature of mobile communications, traffic load is not equal throughout the cellular network. While much traffic is concentrated on a specific cell (i.e., called a hotspot cell), the traffic load on adjacent cells is often low. To efficiently accommodate the imbalance in traffic, load balancing (LB) between base stations has attracted attention in recent years. This paper proposes an advanced LB method for LTE/LTE-A cellular networks which utilizes exiting mechanisms such as handover parameter control (HPC) and cell coverage control (CCC). Since the two mechanisms have advantages and disadvantages, the proposed method selects the appropriate LB method according to the situation. The paper presents overall procedures and a detailed selection algorithm to maximize the offloading effect on the hotspot cell with avoidance of interference on surrounding cells. In addition, through a simulation, we confirmed that 1) the proposed method could achieve higher offloading effect than the native HPC by 20% of cell capacity and that 2) it could avoid interfering with the surrounding cells compared to CCC when the traffic load on the hotspot cell is relatively low.