Energy-efficiency driven load balancing strategy in LTE-WiFi interworking heterogeneous networks

Green communication has been a hot issue with the energy consumption of ICT industry continuously growing. To achieve the goal of energy saving, base station sleep schemes are extensively investigated; however, they are hard to implement in actual commercial network for the risk of losing of users. So in this paper, we try another way to improve the energy efficiency of LTE network by interworking with low energy consuming WiFi networks. Firstly the characteristics of the resource assignment in LTE and WiFi network are analyzed. The energy efficiency of eNodeBs and the degree of user satisfaction are defined as the optimization objections of the load balancing between LTE and WiFi networks. Then it introduces the edge users' handover requirements needed to be satisfied during the load balancing process. Following these conditions, the detailed load balancing algorithm is designed based on the adjustment of signal quality offset. The final simulation experiment verifies that the proposed load balancing algorithm can effectively balance the resources utilization in the LTE and WiFi interworking networks and the energy efficiency of eNodeBs can be improved by 13.11% compared with the case before load balancing with guaranteed user satisfaction.