Patent ID: 9281876
Filing Date: 2016-03-08
CPC Classification: H04B,H04L,H04W

Claim Text:
1. A method performed by a network node configured for operation in a wireless communication network: obtaining received signal strength values for each user equipment among a plurality of user equipments, with respect to each antenna among a plurality of antennas associated with two or more access nodes to be used as a cooperating cell group for Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) data transmissions to the user equipments, wherein at least one of the access nodes includes two or more antennas available for use in the CoMP data transmissions; calculating antenna relationship values for each user equipment with respect to the plurality of antennas, based on the received signal strength values; identifying which ones of the plurality of antennas are most important for each user equipment, based on the antenna relationship values calculated for the user equipment; arranging the plurality of user equipments into two or more groups, so that the user equipments in each group have one or more important antennas in common; and associating subsets of the plurality of antennas with the groups, such that each group is allocated one or more of the antennas identified as being important for the user equipments in the group and such that the CoMP data transmissions to the user equipments in each group use only the associated subset of antennas; and coordinating the CoMP data transmissions to the plurality of user equipments from the cooperating cell set based on scheduling the groups of user equipments separately and scheduling the user equipments in each group together.