Energy efficient load balancing in LTE self-organization networks

Energy efficiency of wireless networks is becoming more and more important because of the steadily rising energy cost and environmental concerns. In a real network with unequal traffic load distributions among cells, by offloading some edge users in a heavily-loaded cell to neighboring lightly-loaded cell, load balance, aims to utilize the radio resource more efficiently and consequently can improve the end-user performance. In this paper an energy efficient load balancing algorithm is proposed. In the proposed algorithm, the target cell in load balance is selected based on the prediction of the possible performance. Furthermore, an energy efficiency scaling factor is introduced into the criteria when selecting the target cell in load balance to achieve the joint optimization of both load balance and energy saving. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the power consumption in the network and at the same time improve the cell throughput.