Total power of the ongoing traffic is a key element in most RRM functions, i.e. power control, call admission control (CAC), handoff control, load control, etc. An efficient RRM procedure should be able to manage all these functions efficiently which cannot be achieved without accurately characterizing the total traffic power. Nevertheless, all the proposed solutions to describe the system capacity have been developed under a set of assumptions that may or may not be valid in a practical CDMA network. Furthermore, the presented solutions to this problem are based on heuristics or simplified analytical models to simplify the computations complexity and, hence, do not accurately represent the system performance. This paper presents a novel model for characterizing the total downlink traffic power for multi-rate DS-CDMA systems. The outage probabilities are calculated as an example application of the derived model.