Uplink load estimates in WCDMA with different availability of measurements

In the uplink of a WCDMA system, a natural choice of resource management control quantity is the uplink noise rise, i.e., total received power over noise power. Unfortunately this quantity is hard to measure. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a number of noise rise estimates which all rely on path gain measurements. These measurements can be made available either periodically or event-driven as described in 3GPP (Release 99). Simulations show that event-driven measurements yield comparable performance to periodic measurements, but with much fewer measurement reports. Despite severely limited path gain knowledge due to that some users report to another RNC, we still manage to estimate the uplink noise rise reasonably well.