Providing enhanced QoS differentiation to customers using geographic load balancing

This paper extends recent developments in geographic load balancing techniques using semi-smart antennas for cellular mobile communication systems by investigating the potential to provide enhanced QoS to realistic 3G services traffic classes and also to provide user prioritization even in situations where non uniform demand occurs over the network. Traditional cellular CAC systems have limited capability to rectify what turns out to be poor decisions apart from simply dropping connections. With cooperative geographic load balancing, if a base station cannot provide the desired service, adjacent base stations adjust their coverage to carry some of the traffic so that further calls, and in particular high priority calls can be accepted without having to drop existing connections; thus mitigating poor decisions. Enhancement of system capacity has been demonstrated in previous work to establish the optimal wireless radiation coverage shapes over a cellular network in real time and for both uplink and downlink in WCDMA and other wireless networks. The results presented show that load balancing approach can provides capacity gains and also provide good QoS discrimination in the uplink and downlink. The algorithm described can be adapted to different wireless technologies and to different kinds of adaptive antenna; from inexpensive semi-smart systems to fully adaptive systems.