On Spatial Load Balancing in wide-area wireless networks

Load Balancing is typically used in cellular wireless networks in the frequency domain to balance paging, access, and traffic load across the available bandwidth. In this paper we extend the concept of Load Balancing to the Spatial domain. We develop two approaches - Network Load Balancing and Single-Carrier MultiLink - for Spatial Load Balancing. While these techniques are applicable to both cellular wireless networks and WiFi networks we illustrate them on EV-DO (a 3G cellular data network). Both these methods apply when the device has more than one candidate server and determine the server(s) using not only the channel quality from the server to the device but also the current load on each server. The proposed techniques leverage existing cellular (EV-DO) network architecture and are fully backward compatible. Network operators can realize both a substantial increase in network capacity and deliver a notable improvement in user experience by applying these techniques. The combination of load balancing in the frequency domain (Smart Carrier Management and multi-carrier) and spatial domain improves the connectivity within a network, enabling an optimal allocation of resources under the p-fair criterion.