Patent ID: 8767596

Claim:
A method of operating a user equipment device in a wireless communication system, the method comprising: receiving contention-based configuration data from a base station in the wireless communication system, the contention-based configuration data comprising: zone data that identifies a plurality of contention-based resource zones for a shared channel supported by the base station, each of the contention-based resource zones defining an area comprising a respective number of physical resource blocks; modulation and coding scheme data that identifies modulation and coding schemes assigned to the contention-based resource zones; and minimum power headroom data that identifies minimum power headroom values assigned to the contention-based resource zones; comparing currently available power headroom of the user equipment device to the received minimum power headroom values to identify a subset of the contention-based resource zones for which the currently available power headroom of the user equipment device satisfies the received minimum power headroom values; and selecting, from the subset of the contention-based resource zones, a transmit resource zone to be used for data packet transmission.