Congestion-Aware Handover in LTE Systems for Load Balancing in Transport Network

Abstract

Long-Term Evolution employs a hard handover procedure. To reduce the interruption of data flow, downlink data is forwarded from the serving eNodeB (eNB) to the target eNB during handover. In cellular networks, unbalanced loads may lead to congestion in both the radio network and the backhaul network, resulting in bad end-to-end performance as well as causing unfairness among the users sharing the bottleneck link. This work focuses on congestion in the transport network. Handovers toward less loaded cells can help redistribute the load of the bottleneck link; such a mechanism is known as load balancing. The results show that the introduction of such a handover mechanism into the simulation environment positively influences the system performance. This is because terminals spend more time in the cell; hence, a better reception is offered. The utilization of load balancing can be used to further improve the performance of cellular systems that are experiencing congestion on a bottleneck link due to an uneven load.