Low-Complexity Load Balancing with a Self-Organized Intelligent Distributed Antenna System

Abstract

A high call blocking rate is a consequence of an inefficient utilization of system resources, which is often caused by a load imbalance in the network. Load imbalances are common in wireless networks with a large number of cellular users. This paper investigates a load-balancing scheme for mobile networks that optimizes cellular performance with constraints of physical resource limits and users quality of service demands. In order to efficiently utilize the system resources, an intelligent distributed antenna system (IDAS) fed by a multi base transceiver station (BTS) has the ability to distribute the system resources over a given geographic area. To enable load balancing among distributed antenna modules we dynamically allocate the remote antenna modules to the BTSs using an intelligent algorithm. A self-optimizing network for an IDAS is formulated as an integer based linear constrained optimization problem, which tries to balance the load among the BTSs. A discrete particle swarm optimization (DPSO) algorithm as an evolutionary algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem. The computational results of the DPSO algorithm demonstrate optimum performance for small-scale networks and near-optimum performance for large-scale networks. The DPSO algorithm is faster with marginally less complexity than an exhaustive search algorithm.