Patent ID: 8380240

Claim:
A method of operating at least two cooperating base station units and a user equipment for coordinated multi-point reception comprising the steps of: measuring at the first cooperating unit the propagation delay τ 1 between the user equipment and a first cooperating unit; measuring at the second cooperating unit the propagation delay τ 2 between the user equipment and a second cooperating unit; computing at the second cooperating unit a function f(τ 2 ) of the propagation delay τ 2 ; transmitting the value of said computed function f(τ 2 ) from the second cooperating unit to the first cooperating unit; computing at the first cooperating unit a function g(f(τ 2 ),τ 1 ) of the function f(τ 2 ) and the propagation delay τ 1 ; computing at the first cooperating unit a timing advance amount for the user equipment for coordinated multi-point reception from the computed function g(f(τ 2 ),τ 1 ); transmitting a timing advance command having the computed timing advance amount from the first cooperating unit to the user equipment; and operating the user equipment according to the timing advance command.