What is cell breathing? - Definition from Whatis.com

Cell breathing is the constant change of the range of the geographical area covered by a cellular telephone transmitter based on the amount of traffic currently using that transmitter. When a cell becomes heavily loaded, it shrinks. Subscriber traffic is then redirected to a neighboring cell that is more lightly loaded, which is called load balancing. Cell breathing is a common phenomenon of 2G and 3G wireless systems including code-division multiple access (CDMA). CDMA2000 and wideband code-division multiple access (WCDMA) are designed to manage cell breathing.

Contributor(s): Thomas Dollente
This was last updated in May 2002

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