QoS-Aware Load Indicators for Intelligent Cell Selection

Load balancing in cellular networks is an important technique to mitigate the imbalanced usage of network-wide air-resources. Specifically, the load information notified by the network to users over the air, i.e., load indicator, helps a user intelligently select a base station (BS) by considering the network load along with the channel quality information obtained by its own local measurement. Our key argument is that the load indicator should be more detailed than overall radio resource utilization since the air resources in packet-based cellular systems are shared according to scheduling discipline among heterogeneous traffic flows with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. Accordingly, we propose QoS-aware load indicators when traffic flows with and without rate constraints are mixed. Then, we discuss two BS selection algorithms, which are devised based on the proposed QoS-aware load indicators. Simulation result shows that our proposed schemes indeed achieve more intelligent BS selections.