IEEE Wireless Communications · 2014 · 410 citations · 10 references
ComputingComputer ScienceEconomicsComputer NetworksGame TheoryOptimizationCommunication NetworksLoad BalancingMobile NetworksNetwork OptimizationResource AllocationResource ProvisioningCapacity OptimizationCellular Communication NetworksCellular NetworksHeterogeneous Cellular NetworksHeterogeneous NetworksLoad Balancing ModelsMarkov Decision ModelsNetwork Resource Allocation
Load balancing, the matching of demand and capacity, is a fundamental problem across engineering, logistics, and economics, and its importance has been amplified by the evolution of cellular networks into dense heterogeneous (HetNet) deployments that introduce new subtleties. This paper argues that several long‑standing assumptions about cellular networks must be reexamined in HetNets, identifies three entrenched myths to dispel, and outlines open research directions. The authors survey and compare primary technical approaches to HetNet load balancing—centralized optimization, game theory, Markov decision processes, and cell‑range‑expansion biasing—and distill design lessons for OFDMA‑based cellular systems.
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 both in the Internet and in 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 paper 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.
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A survey on 3GPP heterogeneous networks
Aleksandar Damnjanovic, Juan Montojo, Yongbin Wei et al. · IEEE Wireless Communications · 2011 · 1.7K citations