ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2011, Vol. 9 ›› Issue (4): 49-54.

• Special Topic • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Spatial Load Balancing in Wide-Area Wireless Networks

Kambiz Azarian, Ravindra Patwardhan, Chris Lott, Donna Ghosh, Radhika Gowaikar, and Rashid Attar   

  1. Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA 92121, U.S.A
  • Online:2011-12-25 Published:2011-12-25
  • About author:Kambiz Azarian (kambiza@qualcomm.com) received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Ohio State University. He joined Qualcomm in 2007 and has since been working on 3G and 4G cellular systems.

    Ravindra Patwardhan joined Qualcomm in 1998. He has worked on ISDN, Globalstar, Telematics, 1xRTT, 1xEV-DO, and UMB.

    Christopher Lott received his Ph.D. in control theory from the University of Michigan. He has worked on 1xEV-DO systems design for more than 10 years and is currently the DO systems lead at Qualcomm. He has designed aspects of communications systems, including LTE, GPS, and Inmarsat.

    Donna Ghosh received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Pennsylvania State University. She joined Qualcomm in 2003 and has been working on 1xEV-DO system design and standardization with an emphasis on MAC design. Her research interests include resource allocation, distributed algorithms, and wireless systems.

    Radhika Gowaikar received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology. She joined Qualcomm in 2006 and is interested in distributed algorithms for resource allocation in wireless networks. She has worked on these for the 1xEV-DO system.

    Rashid Attar received his B.E. in electronics from Bombay University in 1994 and his MSEE from Syracuse University in 1996. He is a senior director of engineering in Corporate Research and Development (CR&D), Qualcomm. He joined Qualcomm in 1996 and was first engaged in the integration of IS-95 systems. Since 1998, he has worked on the system design, prototype, development, standardization, and commercialization of 1xEV-DO (Rev0, RevA, RevB, and DO-Adv) and 1x-Adv. He is currently co-lead of the CR&D DO-Advanced effort and acting lead of the Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) CDMA2000 modem systems team.

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Abstract: Load balancing is typically used in the frequency domain of cellular wireless networks to balance paging, access, and traffic load across the available bandwidth. In this paper, we extend load balancing into the spatial domain, and we develop two approaches—network load balancing and single-carrier multilink—for spatial load balancing. Although these techniques are mostly applied to cellular wireless networks and Wi-Fi networks, we show how they can be applied to EV-DO, a 3G cellular data network. When a device has more than one candidate server, these techniques can be used to determine the quality of the channel between a server and the device and to determine the load on each server. The proposed techniques leverage the advantages of existing EV-DO network architecture and are fully backward compatible. Network operators can substantially increase network capacity and improve user experience by using these techniques. Combining load balancing in the frequency and spatial domains improves connectivity within a network and allows resources to be optimally allocated according to the p-fair criterion. Combined load balancing further improves performance.

Key words: CDMA 2000, EV-DO, DO-RevC, high rate packet data (HRPD), network load balancing (NLB), single-carrier multilink (SCML)