Offloading based load balancing for the small cell heterogeneous network

To cope with exponentially increasing mobile data traffic demand, the concept of small cell network (SCN) has been proposed. In the small cell heterogeneous scenario, conventional macro cells provide fundamental coverage and mobility tracking for the User Equipment (UE) while the small cells provide high data throughput and offloading benefits. However, due to the dense deployment of the small cells and the unsymmetrical distributions of UEs, the offloading scheme should be applied with the consideration of the load and interference conditions in the small cell layer. Further load balancing should also be processed among the small cells to achieve better performance. In this paper, we provide the Offloading based Load Balancing algorithm. First, the offloading procedure performs from the macro cell layer to the small cell layer. Then load balancing is applied in the small cell layer with Voronoi diagrams. Both the two procedures take the load and interference conditions into account. System-level simulation results verify that the proposed scheme achieves load balance, reduces interference, and increases system throughput.