Patent ID: 9668171
Date: 2017-05-30
CPC Classifications: H04W

Claim:
1. A method of scheduling user equipments (UEs) in a scheduling period, the method comprising: for each of X cells in a carrier aggregation system where X is an integer greater than one, determining relative priorities of a plurality of data bearers, each data bearer associated with a respective UE having buffered data and at least one of the UEs is a carrier-aggregated UE that is allowed radio resource allocation to its associated data bearers in at least two of the cells; for each of the carrier-aggregated UEs, distributing the buffered data across all the data bearers of the respective carrier-aggregated UE across those cells in which the respective carrier-aggregated UE and its associated data bearers are allowed radio resource allocation, using a measure of total data throughput for each of those cells; for each of the X cells, allocating radio resources to the data bearers according to the determined relative priorities, such that for each respective carrier-aggregated UE the radio resources allocated to its associated data bearers across those cells in which the respective carrier-aggregated UE is allowed radio resource allocation are sufficient to carry the buffered data as distributed for said respective carrier-aggregated UE; and transmitting, to each of the UEs associated with one or more of the data bearers for which radio resources are allocated during the scheduling period, a schedule indicating the allocation of the radio resources; wherein the measure of total data throughput for each of the respective cells comprises a total number of bytes scheduled across all data bearers for all UEs in the respective cell over an historical averaging window such that an average total throughput per j th cell [Avg-Total-Served-Thpt-Cell(j)] is given by: where: NbrPRBAlloc(n) is a total number of radio resources allocated in the j Highest-MCS is highest downlink modulation and coding scheme usable in the carrier aggregation system; and N defines a size of the historical averaging window and is indexed by n.