SITUATIONAL BANDWIDTH ALLOCATION IN SPECTRAL REUSE TRANSCEIVER
A situational or flexible bandwidth management system which enables management applications to control the allocation of bandwidth in a cellular network of spectral reuse transceivers based on network conditions.
1 . A method for expanding cell coverage areas to cover one or more failed cells, comprising steps of:
(a) determining that a cell has failed.
(b) expanding the adjacent cells to provide coverage for the coverage area of the failed cell.
2 . The method of claim 1 where step a. comprises one or more of the steps from the group comprising; (a) reading transmit power sensors for each cell in the network, a low-threshold value indicating a failure; (b) polling each base station transceiver for health status from a central network management system; and (c) accumulating reports from mobile transceivers indicating which cell pilot signals are detected.
3 . The method of claim 2 where step (c) comprises using geo-location information from GPS devices or through triangulation to determine if a mobile transceiver should be able to see a cell's base station pilot.
4 . Claim 1 where step b comprises one or more of the steps from the group comprising (a) lowering the adjacent cells' transceiver's bandwidth; (b) increasing the adjacent cells' transceiver's transmit power; (c) increasing the adjacent cells' transceiver's receive sensitivity; and (d) shaping the beam of the adjacent cells' antenna.
5 . The method of claim 1 wherein the transceiver is a spectral reuse transceiver of the type described in the '753 application.
6 . The method of claims 1 where the transceiver is a cost efficient spectral reuse transceiver.
7 . The method of claim 1 wherein the failed cell is an edge cell.
8 . A method for redistribution of bandwidth in a cellular network to accommodate fluctuations in traffic load, comprising steps of:
(a) measuring the traffic in each cell in a cellular network;
(b) using a policy to determine how much bandwidth to subtract from less busy cells and how much bandwidth to add to more busy cells, based on the measured traffic of step a;
(c) reducing the bandwidth available to lower-traffic cells according to the policy; and
(d) increasing the bandwidth available to higher-traffic cells, using the bandwidth subtracted from the lower-traffic cells, according to the policy of step b.
9 . The network of claim 8 wherein step a. comprises one or more of the steps of:
(a) measuring the number of transceivers joined to each cell of the network;
(b) measuring the queue depth of each transceiver in each cell in the network;
(c) measuring the number of high-priority transceivers and users joined in each cell;
(d) measuring the total traffic in each cell; and
(e) measuring the percentage of available bandwidth used at each cell of the network;
10 . The network of claim 9 wherein one or more of steps (a) to (c) include geolocation using a GPS devise or triangulation to determine in which cell transceivers are joined.
11 . The method of claim 8 wherein the cell network comprises spectral reuses transceivers of the type described in the aforementioned '753 application.