A handover scheme towards downlink traffic load balance in heterogeneous cellular networks

Traffic load balance is among the most crucial issues in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs), which can lead to much higher throughput, better user fairness and larger coverage for HCNs. In this paper, we consider the user association problem in HCNs and design a handover scheme for traffic load balancing among macro and femto cells. Three types of handover factors are delicately designed with different objectives focusing on throughput or fairness or trying to balance the both. Correspondingly, three typical resource schedulers are adopted to improve the desired performance. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations and reveals considerable improvement in comparison with the maximum biased-received-power association scheme, especially the data rates of the low-rate users. The impact of different base station and user distributions on the balancing results is also analyzed.