A price based load balancing scheme for multi-operator wireless access networks

We study a load balancing strategy, based on the price offered by the base stations to the end-users who are willing to establish a connection. The proposed scheme is compared with a pure load balancing procedure, in a scenario comprising two different operators. We study the impact of modifying the price offered by the base stations, in terms of the achieved load balancing, as well as considering the revenue obtained by the operators. Furthermore, we also enhance the two former access selection schemes, by incorporating the willingness of reducing the number of handovers, so as to analyze the impact over this particular parameter, and over all the previous results. The whole work is conducted over a proprietary event-based simulation tool, which offers the required degree of flexibility and low computational overhead.