Increasing cell capacity by gain control of traffic channels

A cell capacity increasing method of a base station, comprising:

• (a) comparing a forward excess capacity (FEC) value of a base station to a sum of a gain control threshold value and a threshold control value;
• (b) comparing the FEC value to the gain control threshold if the FEC value is not larger than said sum value;
• (c) controlling a traffic channel gain by uniformly reducing channel powers of traffic channel elements of the base station if the FEC is not larger than the gain control threshold value;
• (d) checking whether the base station is in a gain-controlled state if the FEC is greater than the gain control threshold value, and stopping the controlling of a traffic channel gain to exit the gain-controlled state if the base station is in the gain-controlled state;
• and
• (e) determining, after (b), whether a forward allocated power has been reduced, and repeating (a) through (d) if the forward allocated power has been reduced.

A base station in a mobile communication system, comprising:

• a plurality of traffic channel elements;
• a selector/vocoder card (SVC) to allocate traffic channel powers to the plurality of traffic channel elements and process voice data;
• and
• a base station processor ASP) to calculate forward powers of respective sectors of the base station using the traffic channel powers reported by the traffic channel elements, wherein the BSP compares a forward excess capacity (FEC) value of the base station to a gain control threshold value, and controls a traffic channel gain by uniformly reducing channel powers of all traffic channel elements of the base station if the FEC value is not larger than the gain control threshold value.