Patent ID: 9538439
Date: 2017-01-03
CPC Classifications: H04W

Claim:
1. A method for determining available bandwidth of a cell, comprising: estimating an available link capacity of a downlink with a cell for a user equipment based on a communication quality measured in the cell; estimating an available fraction of cell resources for the user equipment over the downlink based at least in part on received assistance information, wherein the received assistance information comprises at least one of a transport block size (TBS), one or more channel quality indicator (CQI) offsets or a CQI-to-TBS mapping table; estimating available bandwidth of the cell as an achievable throughput for the user equipment over the downlink as a function of the estimated available link capacity and the estimated available fraction of cell resources; and communicating with a wireless local area network to associate with the wireless local area network while remaining in idle mode communications with the cell based at least in part on comparing the achievable throughput to one or more thresholds.