Proactive load balancing with admission control for heterogeneous overlay networks

ABSTRACT The next generation wireless networks will be the coexistence of heterogeneous wireless technologies. Balancing the traffic load among different networks can effectively utilize the overall radio resources in the system. In this paper, we propose an efficient load balancing scheme for the heterogeneous overlay systems, which is applied in the call admission control process. If the available network(s) cannot provide enough resource for the request call without degrading the quality‐of‐service (QoS) obtained by the ongoing calls, the system will perform load balancing operations first by initiating vertical handoffs among networks in order to create more rooms for the request call. The load balancing algorithm is to minimize the variance between the network utilizations of the entire system, which can be formulated as a quadratic binary programming problem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can admit more calls into the system compared with the other three reference schemes and then improve the overall throughput. Meanwhile, the scheme can keep the networks working in effective states and provide a better QoS support for users. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.