Patent ID: 8457645

Claim:
A method of allocating channels to terminals within a cell of a cellular mobile telecommunication system, the method comprising: using a channel allocation tiering (CHAT) technique in accordance with which a number (N T ) of available hardware resource units exceeds a number (f) of radio resources, and the number of available hardware resource units are divided into at least two tiers, a first tier and at least a second higher tier, hardware resource units of said at least second higher tier sharing radio resources with any one of the hardware resource units of the first tier, some of the terminals being capable of interference suppression, allocating channels in said tiers to an individual terminal based upon said terminal's ability to operate in a higher interfered channel, said ability determined by one or more of: interference suppression capabilities of the individual terminal, radio requirements of a service used by the individual terminal or radio location of the individual terminal; mapping a set of hardware resource units in the first tier on a set of radio resources such that there are as many hardware resource units as there are radio resources (f); and wherein: a number of hardware resource units in each of said higher tiers except a T-th tier is f, a number of hardware resource units in the T-th tier is N T −(T−1)f, N T is a total number of hardware resource units, and T is a number of tiers and f is the number of radio resources.