Utility-based distributed geographic load balancing in mobile cellular networks

The paper describes a new approach to geographic load balancing in mobile cellular networks with fully adaptive antennas. Our previous work using cooperative negotiation and semi-smart antennas has been shown to be very effective, however, for fully adaptive antenna systems, negotiation becomes increasingly complex because users need to be managed individually. A utility-based approach for geographic load balancing with fully adaptive antennas is proposed and evaluated. Instead of cooperating by exchanging messages between base stations, it has encapsulated a form of cooperation into the utility function. This reduces the system complexity. A comparison is made of system performance using different utility functions and with previous work. The results demonstrate the benefits of this approach.