Uplink Load Balancing over Multipath Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Abstract

The rapidly growing traffic demand on mobile networks and the new services offered by service providers requires effective strategies for handling network resources. One such strategy is the ability of mobile devices to be attached to multiple radio nodes simultaneously. By this strategy the average data rate, that a mobile terminal can transmit/receive, increases and improves the reliability. This new strategy enables the use of dynamic load balancing among radio nodes, which in turn protects mobile networks from congestion caused by sudden load increase or poor channel conditions. Nevertheless load balancing requires techniques for efficiently splitting traffic without increasing the delay or causing packet reordering. In this paper we focus our study to the uplink load balancing case. We propose QBALAN, a new load balancing algorithm that uses two main strategies: long-term strategy splits traffic that remains on the system for long periods of time, and the short-term strategy splits traffic such that packet reordering is minimized. Numerical results show that our algorithm reduces the splitting error while reducing packet reordering.