A method for estimating local traffic load in a simulcast radio system

This paper presents a simple method for estimating the average local traffic load in a simulcast radio system. Such estimation is crucial to achieving efficient resource sharing and dynamic reconfiguration of the simulcast areas. The proposed method is based only on relative power measurements at each radio port (or distributed antenna element) and is applicable to both code-division multiple-access (CDMA) and time-division multiple-access (TDMA) systems. Simulation results are derived to test the method over various system conditions and assumptions. The proposed method is shown to provide excellent results, giving estimates to within /spl plusmn/15% of the actual Erlang traffic, while requiring only an approximate knowledge of the radio propagation environment.