Patent ID: 8730805

Claim:
A communications apparatus comprising: a transceiver circuit operable to communicate with a plurality of communications devices over a radio communications link using a plurality of time and frequency resource blocks; a scheduler operable to allocate the resource blocks to radio bearers, each radio bearer being associated with a communications device, for communicating data between the transceiver circuit and the associated communications device; and a load estimator operable to estimate, for at least one bearer, the resource blocks required to meet a defined quality of service associated with the bearer; wherein the scheduler is operable to provide the load estimator with measurement data for the at least one bearer that varies with radio conditions between the transceiver circuit and the associated communications device, and wherein the load estimator is operable to estimate, for the at least one bearer, the resource blocks required to meet the defined quality of service in dependence upon the measurement data received from the scheduler; wherein the load estimator is operable to estimate, for the at least one bearer, the resource blocks required to meet the defined quality of service in dependence upon a spectral efficiency for the associated communications device, and wherein the load estimator is operable to estimate the load (ρ) for the at least one bearer using the following equation: ρ = a _ ⁢ 1 K ⁢ R req ω _ where: ā is an activity factor for the bearer; K is the total number of available resource blocks; R req is a required bit rate for the bearer; ω is the spectral efficiency for the associated communications device.