Patent ID: 7848758

Claim:
A method comprising: a first base station among a plurality of base stations in a wireless wide area network (WWAN) determining that a level of load in a wireless coverage area exceeds a load threshold; and responsive to determining that the level of load exceeds the load threshold, the first base station (i) obtaining a first keycode from a keycode library, wherein the first keycode then becomes unavailable to the other base stations of the plurality of base stations, (ii) identifying a carrier frequency, and (iii) using the first keycode to activate the identified carrier frequency in the wireless coverage area; wherein the first keycode corresponds to a license for a given base station to activate an additional frequency; the first base station determining whether a neighboring base station in the plurality of base stations is currently using a second keycode from the keycode library to provide service on a particular carrier frequency; and responsive to determining that the neighboring base station is currently using a second keycode from the keycode library to provide service on the particular carrier frequency, the first base station updating a neighbor-list message for the first base station to reflect the neighboring base station providing service on the particular carrier frequency.