Wireless cellular deployments often are deployed in an extended metro or regional coverage area. Often, because of inhomogeneous distributions of mobile user terminals, cells in one part of the network will become overloaded yet nearby cells have surplus radio channel capacity for providing network services. In such scenarios it is useful to reconfigure the cellular network so that some of the users of the overloaded cells have their serving cell changed to nearby cells with surplus through a process known as load balancing.
Conventional load balancing has a number of disadvantages. Load balancing systems apply mitigation on an ad-hoc basis, so they may fluctuate excessively. Algorithms for conventional systems can have a high degree of complexity, leading to unnecessary resource consumption. Furthermore, it is possible to apply excessive mitigation to highly loaded cells resulting in coverage gaps.