Load Balancing Techniques for Dynamic Gateway Selection in LTEWireless Networks

In this paper, we consider a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. The user equipment (UE) nodes connect to the Internet through packet gateway nodes. Multiple P-GWs in the LTE core network forward these packets. Thus, based on how the sessions are established, different gateways may handle different levels of network traffic. If proper load balancing algorithms are not used, the load on some gateways may be higher than others leading to Quality of Service (QoS) degradation. We propose six different heuristics for load balancing, including one based on entropy called EBA. The entropy function provides an accurate measure of the difference in the load on the gateways. The performance studies show that the EBA algorithm provides good performance improvement for networks consisting of 1,00,000 users, 12 APNs and 50 P-GWs. Received on 14 December 2015; accepted on 07 April 2016; published on 20 June 2016