In this paper, we study the performance of multicarrier mobile networks.
Specifically, we analyze the flow-level performance of two inter-carrier load
balancing schemes and the gain engendered by Carrier Aggregation (CA). CA is
one of the most important features of HSPA+ and LTE-A networks; it allows
devices to be served simultaneously by several carriers. We propose two load
balancing schemes, namely Join the Fastest Queue (JFQ) and Volume Balancing
(VB), that allow the traffic of CA and non-CA users to be distributed over the
aggregated carriers. We then evaluate the performance of these schemes by means
of analytical modeling. We show that the proposed schemes achieve quasi-ideal
load balancing. We also investigate the impact of mixing traffic of CA and
non-CA users in the same cell and show that performance is practically
insensitive to the traffic mix.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, submitted to WiOpt201
