Patent ID: 8885525
Filing Date: 2014-11-11
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method for partitioning a soft buffer in a time-division duplex (TDD) carrier aggregation (CA) system having a primary component carrier (PCC) and a secondary component carrier (SCC) supporting multiple serving cells, at least one of the serving cells being configured with a different TDD uplink (UL)/downlink (DL) configuration than the other serving cells, wherein the soft buffer stores hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) processes during HARQ retransmission, the TDD CA system comprising a transceiver and a communication protocol module, the method comprising: determining by the communication protocol module a total number of soft channel bits, a number of transport blocks transmittable to a user equipment (UE) in a transmission time interval (TTI), a maximum number of downlink (DL) hybrid automatic retransmit request (HARQ) processes, and a preconfigured maximum number of HARQ processes; and selecting by the communication protocol module a partition size of the soft buffer according at least to the total number of soft channel bits, the number of transport blocks transmittable to the UE in the TTI, the maximum number of DL HARQ processes, and the preconfigured maximum number of HARQ processes, wherein each serving cell has a dedicated sub-block, wherein the total number of soft channel bits is determined in accordance with a category of the UE, and a partition size of the soft buffer of an i-th serving cell is selected according to a total number of soft channel bits of the i-th serving cell, the number of transport blocks transmittable to the UE in the TTI of the i-th serving cell, and a comparison between a maximum number of DL HARQ processes of the i-th serving cell and the preconfigured maximum number of HARQ processes, wherein i is an index with real value to indicate the serving cell, wherein at least one serving cell has a different maximum number of DL HARQ processes than the other serving cells' maximum number of DL HARQ processes which is determined by the respective TDD UL/DL configuration of the serving cells.