Communications Engineering Level 10

Research of Cell Breathing

The supervisor is:

Dr. ELsadig Saeed

Prepared by Student:

Yosif Mohammed Yosif Juma

 Introduction

Cell Breathing:
Cell breathing has been studied in CDMA cellular networks. The coverage and the
capacity of the CDMA cells are reciprocals to each other. Total interference at the base
station will be increased if the number of the users in the cell increase because of the cell
reuse concept. And in congested cells the users transmit signal with high power to reach the
signal to noise ratio at the received base station. Which in turn increased the interference at
the base station and hence decreasing the overall capacity of the cell. Since the maximal
power is bounded in CDMA hence the user far from the base station may receive poor
service, to overcome such problem the concept of the cell breathing was introduced by

It is defined as the “Cell breathing is a mechanism that attempts to keep the forward and
reverse link handoff boundaries balanced by changing the forward link coverage according
to the changes in the reverse link interference level [1]”.

In other words:
The size of a cell depends on the traffic managed by the base station: a cell shrinks when its
load increases. Indeed, the higher is the number of users in the cell, the higher is the
interference. As a consequence the lower the cell radius becomes. This is the phenomenon
of cell breathing.
Fig: 1 cell breathing and soft capacity

Concepts behind the cell breathing

Forward link handoff boundary is defined as: Forward link handoff boundary is defined as the
contour of mobile locations where

𝐸𝑐𝑎\𝐼𝑜=𝐸𝑐𝑎\𝐼𝑜 ____ (1)

Where Eci is the received pilot chip energy of i-th piloi and Io the spectral density of the total
power seen by the mobile.
And Reverse link handoff boundary is defined as:the contour of mobile locations between
neighboring cells where 1 he received signal to noise ratios at the two base stations is the
same. The reverse link handoff boundary between cell sites A and B is the locations such that:
𝐸𝑏𝐴\𝑁𝑡𝐴=𝐸𝑏𝐵 \𝑁𝑡𝐵 ------- (2)
It can be seen from (1) and (2) that if the interference levels& are the same at both base
stations and the same amount of power is transmitted on the pilot channel from each
base station, then the forward and reverse handoff boundaries will coincide; the
boundary will be halfway between the two cell sites for a uniform propagation model
As the reverse link traffic load is increased, the rise over thermal noise at the base station
increases. It is clear from (2) that the reverse link handoff boundary will move closer to
the base station whose rise over thermal noise is greater. Then, to balance the reverse
and forward link handoff boundaries, the pilot signal of the cell with greater base station
interference must be reduced.

References:
[1]. On Cell Breathing in CDMA networks, A Jalali, Nortel Wireless Networks 2201 Lakeside
Blvd Richardson Texas,75082.
Downloaded from IEEE website.
[2]. Cell Breathing, Sectorization and Densification in Cellular Networks