Comparative Study of Load Balancing Techniques in Mobile WiMAX IEEE 802.16e

Abstract

Mobile Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (Mobile WiMAX) is a wireless Metropolitan Area Network technology based on IEEE 802.16e standard. Mobile WiMAX has been designed with the purpose of enabling mobile Internet from the physical layer to the network layer. In this paper, a comparative study between load balancing techniques in mobile WiMAX is presented. These techniques are Spare Capacity Procedure (SCP) and WiMAX QOS Aware Load Balancing Protocol (WQLP). These load balancing techniques used when network congestion occurred in Mobile WiMAX networks. These two techniques represent the major trends of load balancing in Mobile WiMAX IEEE 802.16e technology. These techniques use directed handovers for Load Balancing (LB) among cells; these handovers were initiated by the Serving Base Station. Performance of load balancing techniques have been analyzed and evaluated based on an extensive simulation. The simulation shows that the performance of WQLP is better than SCP in load distribution but SCP is faster than WQLP in handover process. The elaborated performance analysis shows a set of advantages and disadvantages of these techniques. This evaluation study represents an important entry point for choosing the besttechniques that can distribute load among BSs and guarantee QoS for all MSs using real-time applications.