A Network Architecture for Load Balancing of
Heterogeneous Wireless Networks
Wenxiao Shi, Bin Li, Na Li, Chuanjun Xia
Jilin University, Changchun, China
Email: swx@jlu.edu.cn
Abstract—The traditional centralized load balancing had a
relatively low reliability, and the distributed load balancing
had a huge overhead. To solve these problems, this paper
mapped heterogeneous wireless networks to distributed
grids by introducing Resource Management Unit, and then
presented a hierarchical semi-centralized architecture for
load balancing of heterogeneous wireless networks drawing
on the idea of grid in computer networks. The analytical
models for the integrated reliability and signaling overhead
of the architecture were established. Theoretical analysis
and simulation results indicate that the architecture can
reduce the signaling overhead and improve the system
reliability effectively.
Index Terms—network architecture, signaling overhead,
integrated reliability, load balancing, heterogeneous wireless
networks
I. INTRODUCTION
Radio systems are moving toward forming
heterogeneous wireless networks: collaborations of
multiple radio access networks, which in some cases
operate different radio access technologies [1]. The
deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks is
spreading throughout the world as users want to be
connected anytime, anywhere, and anyhow [2]. 3GPP
specifies some recommendations for methods,
architectures, and design of heterogeneous wireless
network interconnection (in particular, the one formed by
UMTS and WLAN networks), such as those presented in
[3]. The key topics in heterogeneous wireless networks
are referred to as spectrum sensing, coexistence, resource
management, reliability and QoS support avoiding
interference etc. [4].
As a recent research focus, load balancing [5, 6] which
belongs to Radio Resource Management (RRM) is one of
the key technologies in the convergence of heterogeneous
wireless networks. Load balancing is a significant method
to achieve the resource sharing over heterogeneous
wireless networks, and it can improve resource
utilization, enlarge system capacity, as well as provide
better services for users.
Generally, load balancing is divided into two parts [7]:
network architecture and load balancing algorithm. The
former is the foundation of load balancing, and a good
network architecture can improve the efficiency of load
balancing. In the perspective of control mode, load
balancing mechanisms can be classified as centralized,
distributed and semi-centralized and semi-distributed [8,
9]. There are some problems in the first two mechanisms:
the centralized one has a relatively low reliability, while
the distributed one has a huge overhead [10].
A grid [11, 12] is a service for sharing computer power
and data storage capacity over the Internet. Grid
infrastructure is a large virtual organization that integrates
a large mount of distributed heterogeneous resources and
high performance computing capabilities into a super
service, which can provide huge computing services,
storage capability and so on. Grid allows the use of
geographically distributed computing systems that belong
to multiple organizations as a single system. Resource
management and scheduling is the important components
of the Grid. It efficiently maps jobs submitted by the user
to available resources in grid environment [13].
There are some similarities between grid and
heterogeneous wireless networks, such as the dynamic
variation of resources, heterogeneous structure, and the
key technology of integrating and deploying the
distributed resources. Enlightened by the similarities, we
propose a hierarchical semi-centralized architecture
(HSCA) based on basic grids for load balancing of
heterogeneous wireless networks. Since the reliability and
overhead are important performances to a network, we
analyze the two performances of HSCA we proposed in
this paper.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II we briefly discuss the related researches into
overhead and reliability of network architectures. Section
III introduces the HSCA we proposed, and gives the
signaling flows of the HSCA. In Section IV, the modeling
of integrated reliability and signaling overhead for HSCA
is presented followed in Section V by our simulation and
the results. Finally in Section VI we conclude this paper
with discussion of our work.
II.
RELATED WORK
The authors of [14] developed a mathematical
framework that can be used to compactly represent and
analyze heterogeneous networks that combine multiple
entity and link types. They generalized Bonacich
centrality, which measures connectivity between nodes
This work was supported by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (No. 60972028).
JOURNAL OF NETWORKS, VOL. 6, NO. 4, APRIL 2011 623
© 2011 ACADEMY PUBLISHER
doi:10.4304/jnw.6.4.623-630