Providing capacity to keep pace with the explosive growth in wireless data services is a highly complex task, due to the time variant and geographically inhomogeneous nature of offered traffic. To ensure a consistent, high-quality user experience, both site and carrier density must be tailored to match the offered traffic density, with sufficient margin to accommodate large fluctuations in traffic loading.
This task is further complicated by the presence of interference, which is typically distributed randomly both in location and time. The net effect of interference is to consume the design margin intended to accommodate variations in traffic; in those instances where interference coincides with dense traffic, severe service impairments under heavy load are typically the result. In this technical note, we discuss the statistical distributions of traffic and interference from a network perspective, and how poor correlation between measured traffic and uplink channel power can be used to assess interference severity.