Cell breathing (telephony)

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In CDMA-based mobile telephone systems, cell breathing is a mechanism which allows overloaded
cells to offload subscriber traffic to neighbouring cells by changing the geographic size of their
service area. Heavily loaded cells decrease in size while neighbouring cells increase their service
area to compensate. Thus, some traffic is handed off from the overloaded cell to neighbouring cells,
resulting in load balancing
Soft handoff
In cellular telephone communication, soft handoff refers to the overlapping of repeater
coverage zones, so that every cell phone set is always well within range of at least
onerepeater (also called a base station). In some cases, mobile sets transmit signals to, and
receive signals from, more than one repeater at a time.
Soft handoff technology is used by code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems. Older
networks use frequency division multiplex (FDM) or time division multiplex (TDM). In CDMA, all
repeaters use the same frequency channel for each mobile phone set, no matter where the set
is located. Each set has an identity based on a code, rather than on a frequency (as in FDM) or
sequence of time slots (as in TDM). Because no change in frequency or timing occurs as a
mobile set passes from one base station to another, there are practically no dead zones. As a
result, connections are almost never interrupted or dropped.
What is Cell Breathing and why?
The cell coverage shrinks as the loading increases, this is called cell breathing.
In the uplink, as more and more UE are served by a cell, each UE needs to
transmithigher power to compensate for the uplink noise rise. As a
consequence, the UEwith weaker link (UE at greater distance) may not have
enough power to reach theNodeB therefore a coverage shrinkage.
In the downlink, the NodeB also needs to transmit higher power as more UE
arebeing served. As a consequence UE with weaker link (greater distance) may
not bereachable by the NodeB.