Quantifying Operator Benefits of Wireless Load Distribution

As a number of wireless networks, such as the cellular networks (e.g., GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA), wireless local area networks (IEEE 802.11a/b/g), and wireless broadband networks (WiMAX) all become deployed, integrating these networks in order to overflow traffic between them makes sense. A number of papers have shown the benefits of load sharing traffic between various wireless networks from a capacity performance perspective. However, other benefits also exist for load sharing. This paper investigates a broad set of potential benefits, as well as methods to quantify or measure these benefits. Mobile terminals (MTs) benefit from ‘Always Best Connected’ service, but vertical handovers across diverse network can also be used by operators to load share traffic between networks. A number of papers have focused on the performance improvements of load sharing or load balancing traffic between diverse Radio Access Networks ABSTrACT