A passive method for estimating overall LTE cell traffic load by using radio quality information of a user terminal

A method of passively estimating the resource block (RB) utilization rate of a serving cell according to radio-quality information measured by a user terminal is proposed. The estimated RB utilization rate can be regarded as the traffic load on the base station. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, a method for passively estimating a traffic load on a base station via a user terminal without generating any measurement traffic is proposed; second, the effectiveness of the proposed method was validated through experiments on a commercial LTE network.