| Towards the end of the past decade, mobile communication has gained a significant commercial popularity. The number of mobile subscribers is expected to continue to increase. In addition to traditional voice communications services, mobile carriers will also be providing data communications services. Data rates in data communications services will also be increased to match the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applications. In third Generation (3G) cellular systems, user data rates can be up to 2 Mbps. Although high data rates are achieved, fundamental capacity limitation of cellular networks still exists. Call requests are frequently blocked in hotspot areas, such as city centers and places of sport events. Load balancing in a cellular network helps to solve this problem by shifting the load from a hotspot cell to less loaded cells. Several load balancing schemes such as channel borrowing, coverage negotiation, and traffic relaying through limited mobility relaying stations, were proposed to solve this problem. However, these schemes are designed based on conventional mainstream cellular systems in which FDMA or TDMA technology is used. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
