An overview of load balancing in hetnets: old myths and open problems

By Jeffrey G. Andrews, Sarabjot Singh, Qiaoyang Ye, Xingqin Lin, Harpreet S. Dhillon. IEEE wireless communications, 2013

536 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Matching the demand for resources ("load") with the supply of resources ("capacity") is a basic problem occurring across many fields of engineering, logistics, and economics, and has been considered extensively in both the Internet and wireless networks. The ongoing evolution of cellular communication networks into dense, organic, and irregular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) has elevated load awareness to a central problem, and introduces many new subtleties. This article explains how several long-standing assumptions about cellular networks need to be rethought in the context of a load-balanced HetNet: we highlight these as three deeply entrenched myths that we then dispel. We survey and compare the primary technical approaches to HetNet load balancing: (centralized) optimization, game theory, Markov decision processes, and the newly popular cell range expansion (a.k.a. biasing), and draw design lessons for OFDMA-based cellular systems. We also identify several open areas for future exploration.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b8ef33151808b86c3d6111149308160119b33088

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Citations in the corpus

What Will 5G Be? (2014, background): “As the densiﬁcation becomes extreme, some challenges arise: • Preserving the expected cell-splitting gains as each BS becomes more lightly loaded, particularly low-power nodes.”
Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for 5G and Beyond (2017, background): “More particularly, in the 3GPP meeting in 2008, Qualcomm proposed a new cell selection scheme, termed cell range extension [57], for allowing more small cell ofﬂoading to manage the strong macrocell interference at the handsets [58].”
A survey on 5G: The next generation of mobile communication (2015, background): “Interested readers may refer to [21] for further details of load balancing in 5G networks.”
Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective (2015, background): “Such a long-term channel model implies the use of a long-term SINR, which is often effectively used for long-term resource allocation [41], [43].”
User Association in 5G Networks: A Survey and an Outlook (2015, background): “In China, three ministrie— the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST)— set up an IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group in February 2013 to promote 5G technology research in China…”
Ultra-Dense Networks: A Survey (2016, background): “A user finds the signal received from a macrocell stronger than that of a small cell and thus associates to the macrocell [159].”
Modeling and Analyzing Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems (2016, background): “For studying such problems, incorporating the impact of load on the rate characterization is essential [147].”
Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks (2014, background): “Although characterizing SINR is important, rate is the key metric, and can follow quite different trends [27], [28] than SINR because the user load is essentially a pre-log factor whereas SINR is inside the log in the Shannon capacity formula.”
Energy Efficient User Association and Power Allocation in Millimeter-Wave-Based Ultra Dense Networks With Energy Harvesting Base Stations (2017, background): “Load awareness based user association was proposed in [10] and [11].”
Overview of Millimeter Wave Communications for Fifth-Generation (5G) Wireless Networks—With a Focus on Propagation Models (2017, background): “Schemes and models for load balanced heterogeneous networks in a multi-tier architecture are given in [53] and [54].”