Radio resource allocation mechanism

Abstract

A cellular communication system comprising a plurality of user equipment and a network infrastructure. Radio resource of the plurality of cells is divided into more than one radio resource groups. A network infrastructure element detects a requirement of radio resource allocation for a user equipment and determines effective interference to be generated by the required radio resource to a defined group of neighbouring cells. User equipment is allocated a radio resource from one of the radio resource groups on the basis of the determined effective interference to be generated to the defined group of neighbouring cells. Inter-cell interference decreases and the throughput of the cellular system increases, but the exchange of physical layer information is not increased.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention relates to telecommunications and more particularly to radio resource allocation in cellular communication systems.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]A cellular network is a radio network made up of a number of radio cells each served by a transceiver, known as a cell site or base station. Cellular networks are inherently asymmetric such that a set of fixed transceivers serve a cell and a set of distributed mobile transceivers provide services to the users.[0003]A cellular network is able to provide more transmission capacity than a single transmitter network because a radio frequency of a cell can be reused in another cell for different transmission. Frequency reuse, however, causes interference between cells that use the same and nearby frequencies.[0004]This inter-cell interference has conventionally been solved by co-ordination / planning based methods. An example of such methods is frequency reuse where different groups of radio cha...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011]An advantage of the invention is that the inter-cell interference decreases and the throughput of the cellular system increases, but the exchange of physical layer information is not increased.

is that the inter-cell interference decreases and the throughput of the cellular system increases, but the exchange of physical layer information is not increased.

Problems solved by technology

Frequency reuse, however, causes interference between cells that use the same and nearby frequencies.

The method is relatively effective and straightforward, but wastes channel resource.

The reuse factor of these methods still remains low, actually in heavy traffic load they may perform worse than the above disclosed fixed channel assignment method.

In the new emerging systems, for example in the upcoming evolution of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) systems (also called as Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems), the requirements, according to the working assumptions, are challenging.

However, links between cells are expensive and typically cause delays.

Thus, for the time being it seems that reconfiguration of the restrictions will be done on a time scale corresponding to days, and the inter-node communication is going to be very limited, basically with a rate of in the order of days.

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