Enhanced capacity management for 2nd and 3rd generation cellular networks

The issue of how to tackle traffic congestion in cellular networks is of critical importance for mobile network operators. Unfortunately it has been proved that today´s infrastructures have failed to address this issue efficiently so far, a fact that was dramatically demonstrated during critical situations, e.g. earthquakes, new year´s eve, public events of major interest, etc. Nowadays the number of mobile subscribers rapidly increases and additionally, the new data-technologies for wireless access add extra traffic to the already overloaded networks, often causing serious problems to the network. Mobile network operators have already received strong criticism on their failure to address the communication needs of their users in cases like these mentioned above. Even the on-going specifications issued by the telecommunication standardization bodies don´t seem to be able to respond to exaggerated call requests-unpredicted by statistic models. It is also a fact that many operators design their networks incrementally, and usually their investment follows the subscription of new customers to their networks, leading to a deadlock in cases when the demand is higher that their market plan initially predicted (e.g. when tariff rates decline). In this paper we present a set of techniques integrated into an architecture for the efficient cellular network resource management during network overload periods