Patent ID: 8238323

Claim:
A serving base station configured to mitigate uplink interference with neighbor base stations in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network by coordination of uplink zone assignments, the serving base station comprising a scheduler configured to: receive scan reports from associated mobile stations identifying one or more interference sources; assign a common group identifier (ID) to mobile stations having a common interference source based on interference levels of the common interference source; a˜allocate bandwidth within a selected zone of an OFDMA uplink subframe to the mobile stations assigned the common group ID for uplink communications with the serving base station within the uplink subframe, the selected zone being one of a plurality of orthogonal zones of the OFDMA uplink subframe and within the selected zone the allocated bandwidth comprises an orthogonal channel resource in time and frequency that is allocated to each of the mobile stations having the common group ID for uplink communications within the OFDMA uplink subframe, provide, when a neighbor base station is identified as the common interference source, a report to inform the neighbor base station of the selected zone assignment to cause the neighbor base station to refrain from assigning bandwidth within the selected zone to at least some of its associated mobile stations that have identified the serving base station as an interference source; and initiate transmission of a group ID broadcast message using the assigned common group ID to inform the mobile stations having the assigned common group ID of power control and zone assignment for uplink communications, wherein the serving base station and neighbor base station are configured to time-synchronize their OFDMA frames, and the scheduler comprises one or more processor.