A load balancing scheme for supporting safety applications in heterogeneous software defined LTE-V networks

Two novel heterogeneous LTE-Vehicle networks (LTE-V HetNets) are proposed to improve the transmission performance of beacon messages. LTE-V HetNets with uplink-downlink decoupling mechanism are the focus of the study. Software defined network (SDN) architecture is introduced into the LTE-V network to achieve centralized control. Under the SDN framework, a centralized algorithm based on the maximum utility function is proposed, which can achieve global load balancing by autonomously assigning the number of vehicles connected to each base station. Simulation results show the LTE-V HetNets achieve valuable gains compared to single-tier MBS in terms of average uplink rate, total number of the uploaded beacons and the downloaded beacons. In addition, SDN based LTE-V HetNets with decoupling uplink-downlink and load balancing approaches can further improve these performances when the number of vehicles is small.