Patent ID: 8824416

Claim:
A method for allocating shared radio resources among a plurality of user equipments (UEs) in a group of cells that are supported by common processing resources, wherein each of said UEs is served by one of said cells, the method comprising: a) forming a set of candidate UEs that comprise UEs from the group of cells and that need transmission resources; b) setting counter i:=Y, where Y is a predefined number of UEs possible for the common processing resources to process for said group of cells; c) identifying a cell among said group of cells that has most UEs within a subgroup comprising a number i of the candidate UEs with the most urgent need for transmission resources; for the cell identified in step c), performing the further steps of: d) requesting control channel resources in the cell identified for those of the candidate UE within the number i UEs with the most urgent need for transmission resources and that are served by the cell identified; e) obtaining control channel resources in the cell identified for a number of Z UE; f) i:=i−Z; g) removing all the UEs that are served by the identified cell from the set of candidate UEs; if i>0 and if there is/are still some UE(s) in the candidate set of UEs, then repeat from step d), otherwise wait until another scheduling occasion and then repeat from step a).