User-vote assisted self-organizing load balancing for OFDMA cellular systems

Load balancing (LB) is an important function of the self-organizing network (SON) for coping with the uneven load distribution to achieve higher spectrum efficiency and lower operational expenditure. This paper proposes a cluster based self-organizing LB scheme, which employs a user-vote mechanism to avoid the ‘virtual partner’ problem experienced by current LB schemes with the load-based partner selection. The user-vote can assist the hot-spot base station (BS) to efficiently select partner BSs for constructing its cluster, and then shift the traffic to the partners within the cluster. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively solve the ‘virtual partner’ problem. Furthermore, it can reduce the call blocking rate via a small number of partner BSs.