Towards intelligent geographic load balancing for mobile cellular networks

Abstract

We investigate a novel geographic load-balancing scheme for cellular networks that intelligently changes cellular coverage according to the geographic traffic distribution in real time. A cooperative negotiation approach for the real-time control of cellular network coverage is described. The performance of the whole cellular network is improved by contracting and shaping the antenna radiation pattern around a traffic "hot spot" and expanding adjacent cells coverage to fill in the coverage loss. By the use of real time cooperative negotiations between base stations and associated antennas, a near optimal local coverage agreement is reached in the context of the whole cellular network. Results showing the advantage of this technique are presented. Global optimization using constrained real-coded genetic algorithms (RCGA) provides a benchmark. Convergence using penalty functions to manage the constraints was first investigated but gave poor results. A transformation of the problem space is used to remove the constraints, and a criterion that is necessary for successful transformations is explained.