A METHOD FOR ESTIMATING LOCAL TRAFFIC LOAD IN A SIMULCAST RADIO SYSTEM

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