The impact of traffic type on the propagation dependent performance of a CDMA system

This paper examines the impact of a traffic stream´s statistical properties on the propagation dependent performance of a CDMA system. Traffic in a CDMA system directly affects the amount of interference in the wireless channel and therefore the level of traffic corruption. We evaluate a typical outdoor 3G CDMA cellular deployment. System performance is compared using three diverse traffic types with a variety of propagation conditions and system configurations. It is shown that propagation dependent performance is generally insensitive to the statistical properties of the traffic stream. Only with non-hostile propagation conditions and low traffic loads is there a significant performance difference, in which case the more variable traffic results in inferior performance. This suggests that accurate traffic modeling is generally not necessary when dimensioning the propagation aspects of a CDMA system. A simplistic and convenient traffic model will usually be sufficient.