The consequences of interference variability in CDMA cellular systems

We investigate the temporal characteristics of the interference between users of the mobile to cell site link in CDMA cellular systems. We show that, due to the stochastic processes involved, this link inherently exhibits a short term variability in the inter-user interference, which leads to a significant variability in error rate. To the users, this is manifested as bursts of inadequate quality that, because they persist for long enough, affect user perceptions of the quality of service. Consequently, it is these bursts that limit CDMA´s traffic handling capability, and we present a novel method for quantifying this traffic capability