Efficient Cellular Load Balancing Through Mobility-Enriched Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Supporting effective load balancing is paramount for increasing network utilization efficiency and improving the perceivable user experience in emerging and future cellular networks. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly alarming that current communication practices lead to excessive energy wastes both at the infrastructure side and at the terminals. To address both these issues, this paper discusses an innovative communication approach enabled by the implementation of device-to-device (d2d) communication over cellular networks. The technique capitalizes on the delay tolerance of a significant portion of Internet applications and the inherent mobility of the nodes to achieve significant performance gains. For delay-tolerant messages, a mobile node can postpone message transmission-in a store-carry and forward manner-for a later time to allow the terminal to achieve communication over a shorter range or to postpone communication to when the terminal enters a cooler cell, before engaging in communication. Based on this framework, a theoretical model is introduced to study the generalized multihop d2d forwarding scheme where mobile nodes are allowed to buffer messages and carry them while in transit. Thus, a multiobjective optimization problem is introduced where both the communication cost and the varying load levels of multiple cells are to be minimized. We show that the mathematical programming model that arises can be efficiently solved in time. Furthermore, extensive numerical investigations reveal that the proposed scheme is an effective approach for both energy-efficient communication and offering significant gains in terms of load balancing in multicell topologies.