Patent ID: 7636334

Claim:
A method for inter-cell interference coordination with power planning in a radio communication system employing Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) for the air interface communication between a network and a plurality of user terminals, the network comprising a plurality of base stations having means for communication with the user terminals located inside their cell service area, the cells arranged following an adjacent cell pattern, wherein neighbor cells do not have the same number and cells with the same number are separated by at least one cell in-between, for resource planning purposes, each cell having an inner cell region and a border cell region in which inter-cell interference is affecting the quality of service received by a user terminal, the method comprising: designating an OFDM wireless communication channel to a terminal so that the terminal can receive at least two pilot channels from at least two of the plurality of base stations in parallel, one for each cell service area interfering at the border cell region, partitioning an OFDM time-frequency grid in a number of orthogonal, non-overlapping time-frequency patterns, grouping the time-frequency patterns in a number of disjunctive subsets or time- frequency groups, the number of disjunctive subsets corresponding to the number of different cells from the cell pattern for resource planning, using in each cell all time-frequency groups for communication with the terminals, but emitting within a determined time-frequency group corresponding to the cell number with reduced power limited to a certain power value which is smaller than a maximum power available for transmission within all other time-frequency groups, measuring, by the terminal cell, pilot signals from the interfering neighbor cells and reporting to the mobile radio network information about the strength of reception from the cell pilot signals when the terminal moves from the inner cell region of a serving cell to the border cell region of the serving cell in the direction of a neighbor cell, and assigning, by the mobile radio network to the terminal, time-frequency patterns of the time-frequency group with which the neighbor cell emits with limited power based on the information reported by terminal to the mobile radio network.