Load Balancing via Store-Carry and Forward Relaying in Cellular Networks

We bring to the fore a novel load balancing technique based on delay tolerant message forwarding that relies on the store-carry and forward paradigm by utilizing the mobility of vehicular nodes in multi-cell wireless networks. Considerations are made not only on the achievable load balancing performance but also on the en route energy consumption. That accounts for the optimal trade-offs between load balancing, communication energy consumption and message delivery delay in the cellular network. A mathematical program is formulated for finding optimal forwarding decision policies for the proposed store-carry and forward (SCF) relaying scheme for load balancing. Furthermore, a low complexity on-line algorithm for the proposed network setup is derived and its performance is compared with the optimal solution. To sharpen the understanding of the proposed message forwarding techniques, a wide set of numerical investigations are presented revealing that by trading-off message delivery delays, the variance of the load across cells can be dramatically reduced.