Uplink load estimation in WCDMA

All cellular radio systems have radio resource management algorithms which rely on some sort of resource quantity. In the uplink of a WCDMA system, a natural choice of such a 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 four different noise rise estimates. The best performing estimate provides an average error of less than 1 dB for practical load levels. Due to low standard deviation of single estimates it is possible to apply a simple error correction algorithm.