Distributed base station mobility strategy and load balancing in wireless networks

Abstract

Network designers expect a highly mobile, highly responsive, and quickly deployable network structure to enable communication in emergency situations. For this reason, a major research goal for emerging mobile network (mobile sensor network, mobile ad hoc network, etc.)is to achieve good coverage and robust communication performance by coordinated management of base stations or nodes. In this paper, we extend current methods to balancing cell load by taking base station mobility into account.We propose a novel distributed base station mobility strategy (DMS). We focus on a recently attractive network model where localized communication is supported by using mobile base stations (MBSs) placed on moving vehicles. In order to minimize the blocking rate in high traffic density area, the proposed strategy will lead the MBSs to suitable locations and re-share the whole traffic load. We demonstrate the convergence of this distributed mobility strategy by both theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations of realistic networks. The strategy enables each MBS to select destination efficiently and locally with limited information exchange. Compared with the traditional load balancing method based on transmit power control, the proposed algorithm has obvious advantages in reducing the dropped calls, especially with extremely uneven load distribution.