A Mobility-Based Cell Association Algorithm for Load Balancing in a Heterogeneous Network

By installing the various types of cells, imbalance in traffic load and excessive handover among cells in a heterogenous network can be prevalent. To deal with this problem, we propose a mobility-based cell association algorithm for load balancing in a heterogenous network. By defining a dynamic system load as a function of the mobility of mobile stations (MSs) and the transmit powers of cells, the proposed algorithm is designed such that it can optimize a utility function based on the fairness of the dynamic system load. Simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm improves the user perceived rate of MSs located at cell edges with slight increase in the number of handovers compared to a conventional cell association based on received signal strength.