15.5.1.1 General

The objective of mobility load balancing is to distribute load evenly among cells and among areas of cells, or to transfer part of the traffic from congested cell or from congested areas of cells, or to offload users from one cell, cell area, carrier or RAT to achieve network energy saving. This can be done by means of optimization of cell reselection/handover parameters and handover actions. The automation of such optimisation can provide high quality user experience, while simultaneously improving the system capacity and also to minimize human intervention in the network management and optimization tasks.

Intra-RAT, intra-system inter-RAT and inter-system load balancing scenarios are supported.

In general, support for mobility load balancing consists of one or more of following functions:

• Load reporting for intra-RAT and intra-system inter-RAT load balancing;
• Load balancing action based on handovers;
• Adapting handover and/or reselection configuration;
• Load reporting for inter-system load balancing.