Adaptive load balancing between multiple cell layers

The target of this paper is to quantify some of the benefits of load information sharing for traffic management in an environment where several different radio access technologies coexist with cells on several hierarchical layers. The benefits of changing the load based handover thresholds depending on the load of the neighbouring inter-system/layer cells are investigated by dynamic simulations for real-time traffic. The results show that the number of unnecessary handover attempts and failures can be significantly reduced by tuning the load based handover thresholds, and the load threshold tuning period should be between 10-30 s in order to minimise unnecessary handover measurements and signalling.