Patent ID: 8897798

Claim:
A method comprising: computing relative uplink channel gain of a user equipment to its serving and neighboring cell base stations, wherein computing the relative uplink channel gain comprises taking into account channel gain to the user equipment's serving and neighboring cell base stations and wherein the relative uplink channel gain information is calculated using an uplink sounding reference signal received from the user equipment by the user equipment's serving base station; computing one or more parameters for scheduling and resource allocation among the user equipment and additional user equipments, wherein the one or more parameters are calculated so as to take into account the relative uplink channel gain of the user equipment and a weighting associated with the user equipment; wherein at least one of the one or more parameters is calculated so as to maximize overall uplink throughput among all of a plurality of user equipments while providing at least a guaranteed minimum throughput to all users capable of transmitting the guaranteed minimum throughput; wherein at least one of the one or more parameters takes into account the throughput provided to a user equipment by allocation of a resource block against average throughput provided to the user equipment; wherein computing the one or more parameters is based at least in part on an analysis of benefit to the user equipment of allocation of a resource in light of an interference penalty imposed by the allocation on neighboring cell base stations; and wherein resource blocks are allocated to user equipments in contiguous groups with the size of a contiguous group assigned to a user equipment being computed based at least in part on a target number of resource blocks computed for the user equipment.