A Novel Load Balancing Scheme for Cellular-WLAN Heterogeneous Systems with Cell Breathing Technique

This paper proposes a novel load balancing scheme, for an operator-deployed cellular-WLAN heterogeneous network (HetNet), where the user association is controlled by employing cell breathing technique for the WLAN network. This scheme, eliminates the complex coordination and additional signalling overheads between the users and the network, by allowing the users to simply associate with the available WLAN networks similar to the traditional WLAN-first association, without making complex association decisions. Thus, this scheme can be easily implemented in an existing operator-deployed cellular-WLAN HetNet. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of load distribution between cellular and WLAN networks, user fairness, and system throughput, which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed scheme in load distribution and user fairness while optimising the system throughput. In addition, a cellular-WLAN interworking architecture and signalling procedures are proposed for implementing the proposed load balancing schemes in an operator-deployed cellular-WLAN HetNet.