Improving load balancing mechanisms in wireless packet networks

This paper provides a comparative performance evaluation of various load balancing schemes in cellular packet networks. With respect to circuit switched networks, wireless packet technology adds the further issue of quality of service of accepted connections. In fact, with packet technology, transmission error performance does not uniquely depend on the perceived channel quality, but it can be improved by adopting a scheduling mechanism enforcing fast retransmission of corrupted packets. The result is that throughput can be traded off with QoS experienced by an admitted flow. This paper proposes new packet-level load balancing mechanisms. In addition to the number of calls admitted in a cell, our schemes use supplementary packet level information, expressed in terms of effective resource consumption of each individual call when retransmission mechanisms are employed. Simulation results prove the superiority of our proposed schemes with respect to traditional load balancing schemes.