Efficient Priority Access to the Shared Commercial Radio with Offloading for Public Safety in LTE Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract

This paper presents the algorithm Courteous Priority Access to the shared commercial radio with offloading (CPAwO), for public safety network (PSN) over LTE heterogeneous networks (HetNets). We propose a solution for prioritization of PSN users with access to the commercial radio network resources. Our model offers additional radio resources to the PSN. Furthermore, it ensures a certain priority for commercial users by assigning quantities of additional radio resources through the courteous scheme. This allows delaying preemption and blocking bearers when the radio resources are limited. The other part of CPAwO model is to apply the principle of offloading in order to reduce the impact of the macrocell congestion. This technique is to switch the new bearers arriving at the LTE macrocells to small cells, in order to decrease the number of the blocked and interrupted bearers in the network. The results of the simulation showed that the allocation of radio resources via the courteous mechanism with offloading of new bearers to small cells reduces the rate of blocking bearers and delays the preemption of active bearers present in the LTE HetNets. It also reduces the cost of the end-to-end communications, thanks to the reallocation of free frequencies.