Patent ID: 9301198
Filing Date: 2016-03-29
CPC Classification: H04W

Claim Text:
1. An enhanced Node B (eNB) configured for use in a cooperative radio access network (C-RAN), the eNB comprising: a base-band unit (BBU) processing pool comprising a plurality of processing units, the BBU processing pool configured to share a processing load of several sectors; a control unit to monitor the processing load of the processing units and perform dynamic load sharing by migrating baseband processing between the processing units without changing a carrier used by user equipment (UE) operating with a sector; a traffic data switch network to switch traffic packets between a core network the processing units of the BBU processing pool based on instructions provided by the control unit; a front-end unit to communicate antenna signals with a plurality of remote-radio units (RRUs); and a raw data switch network to couple the antenna signals from the front-end unit to selected ones of the processing units of the BBU processing pool based on instructions provided by the control unit, wherein the front-end unit includes: an RRU interface including fiber for multiplexing and demultiplexing the antenna signals; and a pre-processing unit to perform fixed signal processing operations on the antenna signals including FFT/IFFT and PRACH functions, wherein the pre-processing unit receives uplink antenna signals from the RRU interface and provides processed antenna signals to the raw data switch network, wherein the pre-processing unit processes downlink signals received from the raw data switch network and provides downlink antenna signals to the RRU interface, wherein the pre-processing unit includes resource block (RB) selection circuitry to select resource blocks for uplink and downlink communications with the user equipment based on instructions from a MAC scheduler, and wherein the fixed signal processing operations performed by the pre-processing unit and the resource block selection operations performed by the pre-processing unit are performed at an RRU.