Title
A Proposed Network Balance Index for Heterogeneous Networks.
Abstract
Load balancing and fairness are used in the heterogeneous network literature to describe how the users or user rates are distributed across the network. While quantitative metrics of fairness exist, there is no formal metric for quantifying load balance. In this letter, we demonstrate that a fair network may not be a balanced one, since fairness is from a user perspective, while load balance is from a network perspective. We propose a new network balance index (NBI) metric to measure the load balance across the network, which accounts for transmit powers, bias values for cell range expansion, and multiplicatively weighted Voronoi coverage areas of heterogeneous base stations. We show an application of the proposed metric by implementing a user association refinement algorithm, which aims to improve the NBI metric. Our mathematical analysis and simulations establish that when users are heavily clustered, increasing the NBI metric using the proposed algorithm also increases the sum rate despite decreasing fairness. This highlights the usefulness of the proposed NBI metric in network planning.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/LWC.2016.2633996
IEEE Wireless Commun. Letters
Keywords
Field
DocType
Base stations,Measurement,Indexes,Clustering algorithms,Load management,Algorithm design and analysis,Wireless communication
Load management,Base station,Mathematical optimization,Algorithm design,Network planning and design,Load balancing (computing),Computer science,Computer network,Fairness measure,Voronoi diagram,Heterogeneous network
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
6
1
2162-2337
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yifei Huang1233.56
Salman Durrani2121771.37
Pawel A. Dmochowski314425.36
Xiangyun Zhou42411120.16