Investigations on network-wide load balancing for proportional fair scheduling based TDMA cellular systems

The military organizations around the world are increasingly adopting commercial cellular standards for their mission critical communication networks. Most of the cellular standards include support for several new techniques to implement network-wide load balancing to obtain optimum network performance. The goal of this paper is to understand the effect of load balancing on key performance indicators (KPIs) such as throughput and user-perceived delay. We first introduce analytical models to describe sector throughput as a function of the number of active users. We also develop models to study the delay experienced by HTTP traffic sources. Using these models, we quantify the gains achieved from performing load balancing and demonstrate that load balancing achieves significant performance gains in terms of sector capacity and user experience.