1 Multi-service Load Balancing in a Heterogeneous Network with Vertical Handover

Abstract—In this paper we investigate multi-service load balancing mechanisms in an overlay heterogeneous WiMAX/WLAN network through vertical handover. Considering the service characteristics of the overlay heterogeneous network together with the service requirements of different applications, all streaming applications are served in WiMAX while elastic applications are distributed to WiMAX and WLAN. Two load balancing mechanisms are compared which switch the elastic application with maximum (MAX) and minimum (MIN) remaining size respectively to WLAN. Simulation results indicate that MIN outperforms MAX at the cost of significantly increased number of load balancing actions. Furthermore, it is discoverd that both load balancing granularity and proper integration of streaming and elastic applications in WiMAX determine the whole system performance. Index Terms—vertical handover, wireless heterogeneous networks, load balancing, multi-service I

Multi-service Load Balancing in a Heterogeneous Network with Vertical Handover, 1st European Teletraffic Seminar 2011, to be published

Abstract—In this paper, we investigate load balancing mechanisms in heterogeneous WiMAX/WLAN network. By taking both the service characteristics of the two networks and service requirements of two kinds of applications into consideration, we distribute all streaming applications to WiMAX with preemptive service priority. Then the remaining capacities of WiMAX and the entire capacity of WLAN are utilized for serving elastic applications. Accordingly, we proposed two size thresholds based on which elastic applications are dispatched to WiMAX or WLAN. Numerical results indicate that dispatching elastic applications with smaller size to WLAN performs fair well compared with other dispatching mechanisms. It is also found that the size distribution has significant impact on the performance of load balancing mechanisms. I