Intra-system load balancing between adjacent GSM cells

The target of this paper is to quantify some of the benefits of different intra-layer load balancing methods in GSM system. The performance of two different load balancing algorithms are studied in irregular network scenario. The benefits of 1) changing the power budget handover threshold between adjacent cells depending on the load differences of the neighboring intra-system/layer cells, and 2) prioritising the handover candidates based on the load differences within some predefined tuning/prioritisation margins are investigated by dynamic simulations for real-time (speech) traffic. The obtained results show that the overall capacity of the network can be significantly improved (up to 30-14%) by utilising intra-system load balancing algorithms, in irregular simulation scenario. The traffic in the cells with high load is distributed over the neighbor cells, allowing to increase the traffic supported by the whole system maintaining the same (or almost the same) quality for the connections.