A novel cell selection strategy with load balancing for both idle and RRC-connected users in 3GPP LTE network

In current LTE protocol, the cell selection mechanism based on only the Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) would easily bring high call dropping rate due to ignoring the cell load status. In our paper, for the RRC connected users and the idle users, a novel cell selection strategy is proposed through taking the cell load condition as one selection criterion and applying polling strategy until a proper cell is selected. Moreover, load balance method is designed to offload the excess traffic to those low-loaded cells, making the system resources to be utilized more abundantly. Qualitatively, our analysis based on an n-demensional Markov Chain modeling shows that the load balance process can reduce the call outage probability, which is verified by the simulation results. Our strategy can bring less new call blocks, less handoff call drops and more balanced resource utilization of different cells.