Load-Aware Offloading Strategy in Two-Tier Heterogeneous Network

Although small cell offloading technology can alleviate the congestion in macrocell, aggressively offloading data traffic from macrocell to small cell can also degrade the performance of small cell due to the heavy load. Because of collision and backoff, the degradation is significant especially in network with contention-based channel access, and finally decreases throughput of the whole network. To find an optimal fraction of traffic to be offloaded in heterogeneous network, we combine Markov chain with the Poisson point process model to analyze contention-based throughput in irregularly deployment networks. Then we derive the close-form solution of the throughput and find that it is a function of the transmit power and density of base stations. Based on this, we propose the load-aware offloading strategies via power control and base station density adjustment. The numerical results verify our analysis and show a great performance gain compared with non-load-aware offloading.