Patent ID: 8923136

Claim:
A method of controlling resource utilization in a telecommunications network, wherein the telecommunications network comprises a plurality of mobile terminals and at least one radio base station, wherein the mobile terminals are configured to transmit messages to the radio base station over an uplink control channel, and wherein resources for said uplink control channel comprise a plurality of resource blocks, each resource block corresponding to a period of time and a frequency bandwidth, the method comprising: measuring an error rate of messages transmitted over the uplink control channel; and on the basis of said measured error rate and one or more comparable thresholds, adapting a distribution of messages over said plurality of resource blocks on the uplink control channel by adapting the manner in which resource blocks transmitted by different mobile terminals are multiplexed onto the uplink control channel, wherein said adapting a distribution of messages comprises: if the measured error rate is above the one or more thresholds, adapting the distribution of messages such that fewer messages are received over the uplink control channel in a given time interval, thereby reducing the error rate.