A load balancing process includes determining when the cell is overloaded, determining whether the cell is in a hold state, maintaining a current mitigation state for the cell when the cell is determined to be in a hold state, determining whether traffic has decreased for the cell since a previous time and whether mitigation was applied to the cell at the previous time, applying a hold state to the cell when the traffic is determined to have decreased and the mitigation is determined to have been applied, determining whether performance has decreased by a predetermined level for the cell when the cell is not in the hold state, and applying mitigation to the cell when performance has decreased by at least the predetermined level. Such a process may be implemented as a state machine in a system.