In order to provide load balancing in a wireless network that includes a cell with two or more carriers, sequential service requests for radio resources are allocated to respective ones of the two or more carriers in a staggered manner (i.e., a round robin, or least recently used (LRU) approach). In an embodiment, the sequential requests are directed so as to allocate channelization codes of respective code trees associated with the two or more carriers substantially equally. The signal strength of a carrier may be checked prior to allocation. Trigger conditions may be checked prior to allocating a request to a carrier using the LRU approach. The trigger conditions may include power utilization of a first carrier compared to a second carrier, channelization code tree offset between two or more code trees respectively associated with the two or more carriers, and/or average bit rate per subscriber load of the carriers.