Patent ID: 7496367

Claim:
In a wireless communication system, wherein a traffic load between a Base Transmitter Station (BTS) and one or more Access Terminals (AT) is carried by multiple carrier pairs, each pair comprising a forward link (FL) and a reverse link (RL), a method for assigning a new traffic flow to one of said carrier pairs wherein said method comprises the steps of: determining whether said new traffic flow is a first traffic flow type or a second traffic flow type; estimating the comparative utilizations that said new traffic flow will have on the forward and reverse links of a carrier pair, said new traffic flow being asymmetrical if there will be more utilization of one of said links than the other, and said new traffic flow being symmetrical if utilization of the two links will be substantially the same; selecting a procedure from a set of loading calculation procedures, wherein said selected procedure is determined by both the flow type and the comparative link utilizations of said new traffic flow; calculating a loading metric value for each of said carrier pairs using said selected procedure, the loading metric value being calculated using a function f(max(1/N, A)×B), wherein f is a selected positive decreasing function of a probability that a time slot will be assigned to the new traffic flow, N is a number of current active best effort flows of the new traffic flow, A is a probability that the time slot is idle, and B is a probability that a slot is used for a transmission of best effort traffic; and assigning said new traffic flow to the carrier pair found to have the lowest loading metric value.