Mobility Load Balancing – A Case Study: Simplified vs. Realistic Scenarios

The performance of emerging self-organizing network (SON) algorithms is often evaluated based on simplified, regular hexagonal networks. Nevertheless, such algorithms are supposed to exploit the inherent inhomogeneity and therefore need to be tested in realistic network scenarios. For this, a common SON algorithm, namely mobility load balancing (MLB), is evaluated with different degrees of complexity in the simulation scenarios; and the results show a significant impact on the performance of MLB. Moreover performance characteristics for the different scenarios are compiled. Keywords— hexagon scenario; realistic scenario; SON; selforganizing networks; MLB; mobility load balancing; network management; mobility models;