Patent ID: 8103310

Claim:
A method comprising: a macro base transceiver station (BTS) that has a backhaul connection to a radio network controller (RNC) and provides service to access terminals on a plurality of sector-carriers, each sector-carrier having a respective coverage area, detecting that a current utilization of the backhaul connection exceeds a backhaul-congestion threshold; responsive to detecting that the current utilization of the backhaul connection exceeds the backhaul-congestion threshold, the macro BTS identifying one or more of the sector-carriers in the plurality of sector-carriers having a respective current air-interface utilization that is less than a respective sector-carrier-congestion threshold for the respective sector-carrier; the macro BTS identifying one or more femtocells that are positioned in the coverage area of the one or more identified sector-carriers; and the macro BTS offloading some reverse-link traffic to each identified femtocell over a forward link of an identified sector-carrier in whose coverage area the respective identified femtocell is positioned, for forwarding of the offloaded traffic by the one or more identified femtocells over a packet-data network to an intended destination of the offloaded traffic.