Cellular Network Infrastructure » Radio Access Network » OsmoBSC

3GPP TS 48.008 Section 3.2.1.49 specifies the encoding of a LOAD INDICATION message.

The related procedure is described in section 3.1.20.

The purpose of the load indication procedure is to inform all neighbour BSS's about the traffic situation of a cell.
The philosophy is to control the incoming handover traffic at the source, i.e. the BSS of the concerned cell informs all of its neighbour BSS's about the load situation. This is achieved by sending a LOAD INDICATION message to the neighbour BSS's. On receipt of the LOAD INDICATION message the BSS may analyse the load information and take the traffic load into consideration when deciding a handover.
The algorithm in which the BSS decides on starting a Load Indication procedure is operator dependent.
The implementation of the Load Indication procedure shall be regarded as optional, that means, if this procedure is not used, the Load Indication message may be ignored by these network elements.

We currently do not implement parsing such LOAD INDICATION messages received via the MSC, and hence do not consider load of "remote" cells (attached to a different BSC) when performing inter-BSC hand-over.