US Patent 7920867 Modified overhead adjustment function

A MOAF algorithm is used to resize cells for balancing capacity. The MOAF algorithm bases its decision on a cell and all other cells which the algorithm decides are sufficiently close in a propagation sense to affect the results. The MOAF algorithm also automatically determines those cells in an area which are most heavily loaded and those cells which are lightly loaded. The MOAF algorithm will only decrease the size of a cell if it determines specific adjacent cells that are willing and able to accept the load, and the MOAF algorithm will increase the size of a cell only if there is a nearby heavily loaded cell that requires the removal of load. Moreover, the MOAF algorithm can be tuned (via the threshold parameter T) to shift the focus of the optimization from avoidance of coverage holes to the avoidance of creation of excessive handover legs. Because the changes are electrical rather than physical they can be deployed instantaneously via the network management system thus saving the cost of sending a field crew to the site. Moreover, it is possible to make these changes much more frequently than has been possible in the past thereby permitting the optimization of the network to be done in near real time to meet the temporal changes in the geographic distribution of customers.