Patent ID: 11956766
Assignee: NOKIA SOLUTIONS AND NETWORKS OY
Field: Telecommunications (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. An apparatus comprising:
at least one processor; and
at least one memory including a computer program code, wherein the at least one memory and the computer program code are configured, with the at least one processor, to cause the apparatus to:
select, based on beam metric, a beam to be scheduled for a slot that is upcoming, wherein the beam metric is defined as a weighted sum of scheduler metrics, associated with terminal devices and wherein weights reflect a required number of physical resource blocks for the terminal devices;
select a terminal device to be scheduled in the selected beam, wherein the selection of the terminal device is based on the terminal device having considered the selected beam as a best beam, and allocate physical resource blocks to the terminal device;
choose a beam configuration to be used for the selected beam based, at least partly, on user traffic and load distribution; and
trigger a switching event, prior to or during, the slot, wherein the switching event comprises producing the chosen beam configuration by providing a beamforming command and using a control line controlling a switch network comprised in phase shifters to steer the beam, and wherein the phase shifters are comprised in a radio frequency front-end unit that comprises a plurality of antenna columns, and the phase shifters are placed in front of selected antenna sub-arrays comprised in the plurality of antenna columns.