Patent ID: 8155088
Filing Date: 2012-04-10
Classification: H04W

Abstract:
1. A method for allocating resources in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) network, wherein the resources include a radio frequency spectrum of subcarriers partitioned into resource blocks of sets of the subcarriers, and wherein the network including a set of cells or sectors, wherein cluster includes a set of adjacent cells or adjacent sectors, and wherein each cell or each sector includes a base station for serving a set of user equipment (UEs) in the cell or sector, comprising: partitioning each set of UEs in each cell into a set of cell-center UEs and a set of cell-edge UEs; reserving, for each base station, a cell-center bandwidth for allocation to the set of cell-center UEs; reserving, for each base station, cell-edge bandwidth for allocation to the cell-edge UEs; allocating a total cell-center bandwidth to the cell-center UEs in each cell of each cluster; and sharing the cell-edge bandwidth between the cell-edge UEs in a given cluster, wherein the set of UEs communicate with the base stations, and the base stations communicate with the other base stations in the cluster, and further comprising: transmitting, by each base station, training signals to the set of UEs in the cell; estimating a quality of channels between the BS and the set of UEs based on the training signals; feeding back the quality of the channel to the base station; determining UEs having a highest performance metric for each resource block to allocate; transmitting, by each base station in the cluster, the performance metric to a scheduler; allocating, by the scheduler, the resource blocks to the base stations; transmitting data from the base stations to the set of UEs according to the allocating by the scheduler.