A Cooperative Cellular Architecture with Emphasis on Traffic Load Balancing

Future cellular systems target the provision of high-speed multimedia and data services. However, support of such new services intensifies traffic burstiness and poses an increase of threat of congestion. This paper proposes a cooperative cellular architecture through which load balancing is achieved by exploiting the broadcast nature of radio waves and using minimum overhead. Unlike other existing architectures, in this scheme, neither a routing algorithm nor an additional frequency band is required. Both analytical and simulation results are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture. In addition, it is shown that nodes selfish behavior does not significantly affect the performance of the system when only mobile terminals are used as cooperative nodes.