Estimation of the Carrier-to-Interference Ratio in Cellular Radio Systems

The problem to track time-varying parameters in cellular radio systems is studied. The focus is on estimation based only on the signals that are readily available. Previous work has demonstrated very good performance relying on analog measurement. In a real system most of the information is lost due to quantization and sampling at a rate that might be as low as 2 Hz (GSM case). Therefore a different approach is required and for that matter a maximum likelihood estimator has been designed and exemplified in the case of GSM. The needed probability functions of the measurements cannot be described analytically. Instead point-mass approximations can be obtained from Monte-Carlo simulations for each point in a grid covering the interesting parameter space. The proposed algorithm can be tuned to track both slowly and fast varying parameters individually. Since most computations take place in the base stations, the estimator is ready for implementation in a second generation wireless system. No update of the software in the mobile stations is needed.