Load balancing is typically used in the frequency domain of cellular wireless networks to balance paging, access, and traffic load across the available bandwidth. In this paper, we extend load balancing into the spatial domain, and we develop two approaches-network load balancing and single-carrier multilink-for spatial load balancing. Although these techniques are mostly applied to cellular wireless networks and Wi-Fi networks, we show how they can be applied to EV-DO, a 3G cellular data network. When a device has more than one candidate server, these techniques can be used to determine the quality of the channel between a server and the device and to determine the load on each server. The proposed techniques leverage the advantages of existing EV-DO network architecture and are fully backward compatible. Network operators can substantially increase network capacity and improve user experience by using these techniques. Combining load balancing in the frequency and spatial domains improves connectivity within a network and allows resources to be optimally allocated according to the p-fair criterion. Combined load balancing further improves performance.
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