Offloading in Heterogeneous Networks: Modeling, Analysis, and Design Insights

By Sarabjot Singh, Harpreet S. Dhillon, Jeffrey G. Andrews. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2012

717 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Pushing data traffic from cellular to WiFi is an example of inter radio access technology (RAT) offloading. While this clearly alleviates congestion on the over-loaded cellular network, the ultimate potential of such offloading and its effect on overall system performance is not well understood. To address this, we develop a general and tractable model that consists of M different RATs, each deploying up to K different tiers of access points (APs), where each tier differs in transmit power, path loss exponent, deployment density and bandwidth. Each class of APs is modeled as an independent Poisson point process (PPP), with mobile user locations modeled as another independent PPP, all channels further consisting of i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. The distribution of rate over the entire network is then derived for a weighted association strategy, where such weights can be tuned to optimize a particular objective. We show that the optimum fraction of traffic offloaded to maximize SINR coverage is not in general the same as the one that maximizes rate coverage, defined as the fraction of users achieving a given rate.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06f7d88280e9a4acee12e29c53499074e22c906e

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Citations in the corpus

Energy-Efficient Design of MIMO Heterogeneous Networks With Wireless Backhaul (2015, background): “The assumption above is motivated by the fact that the number of UEs Nm served by a MBS has distribution [53]”
Ultra-Dense Networks: A Survey (2016, background): “A user is associated to a tier-k BS if it provides the maximum biased received power, this can be formulated as [80]:”
An overview of load balancing in hetnets: old myths and open problems (2013, methodology): “Even randomly deployed BSs at arbitrary transmit power do not decrease SIR assuming a max-SIR association, as shown in [10, 11] and stated in [9].”
User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook (2015, methodology): “[110] biased UA DL Distributed Moderate - Moderate - Moderate [111] biased UA DL Distributed Moderate High High [112] biased UA+spectrum partitioning DL Distributed High - Moderate - Moderate [113, 114] biased UA+spectrum partitioning DL Distributed High - Moderate High [115] biased UA+spectrum part”
Smart radio environments empowered by reconfigurable AI meta-surfaces: an idea whose time has come (2019, background): “Two interlinked approaches are load balancing [42] and the densification of base stations.”
Wireless Networks Design in the Era of Deep Learning: Model-Based, AI-Based, or Both? (2019, background): “This is a well-known issue in cellular networks, and is tackled in different ways, among which load balancing methods [63] and the densification of base stations (ultra-dense networks).”
Data Offloading Techniques in Cellular Networks: A Survey (2015, neutral): “Similarly, Singh et al. model ofﬂoading considering the eventuality of congestion at the APs [19].”
Stochastic Geometry for Modeling, Analysis, and Design of Multi-Tier and Cognitive Cellular Wireless Networks: A Survey (2013, background): “The work in [54] for cellular networks was extended to a single cellular network consisting of K-tiers in [55], and to M -cellular networks each consisting of K-tiers in [56].”
A Primer on Cellular Network Analysis Using Stochastic Geometry (2016, methodology): “Reference [3] also handles closed-access (which reduces the coverage probability and violates the SIR invariance property) and the multi-RAT case is considered in [37].”
Joint Resource Partitioning and Offloading in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks (2013, methodology): “An approximate load and rate distribution was derived for multiple radio access technology (RAT) HetNets in [24].”
Modeling and Analyzing Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems (2016, methodology): “We provide the formulas for load distribution here, and interested readers can find the proof in Appendix B of [153].”
Modeling and Analysis of Cellular Networks Using Stochastic Geometry: A Tutorial (2016, background): “Similar examples exist for other new technologies such as D2D communication [124]–[128], coordinated multi-point transmission [96]–[98], offloading and load balancing [63]–[67], uplink/downlink decoupling [58], massive MIMO [91], and so on.”
Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks (2014, methodology): “The above approximation was proposed in [27] for approximating area distribution of weighted PV and was verified through simulations.”