A threshold-based multi-traffic load balance mechanism in LTE-A networks

With the development of heterogeneous networks, small cell is introduced into LTE-A networks to satisfy the demand of user equipments (UEs) with various traffic. Due to the existence of small cells and multi-traffic UEs, traditional mobility load balance (MLB) schemes have not been suitable for the current LTE-A network. By reconfiguring the handover thresholds on the basis of cell load, these algorithms are envisioned to cope with the contradiction between large network capacity demand and shortage spectrum resources. However, the existed algorithms are always focusing on the single traffic which are not efficient for the scenario with non-uniform traffic distribution in small cells. In this paper, we propose a multi-traffic load balance (MTLB) algorithm to balance the traffic load and improve the network capacity with an appropriate handover procedure. In this MTLB algorithm, a novel cell selection method will be executed to improve the quality of service (QoS) of UEs. Moreover, the adaptive adjustment method of threshold and TTT (time to triggering) will be introduced to enhance load balance and reduce the call drop rate. Meanwhile, the simulation results strongly verify that the proposed MTLB algorithm can achieve a good resource utilization and the network throughput can also be improved.