Enhanced power headroom reporting in wireless communication networks

1. A method in a wireless communication device, the method comprising:

determining a first configured maximum transmit power (P CMAX ) value corresponding to a first set of resource blocks (RBs) having a first set of subcarriers in a carrier for a subframe, the first set of RBs including less than a complete set of RBs constituting the carrier;

determining a second P CMAX value corresponding to a second set of RBs having a second set of subcarriers in the same carrier for the subframe, the first and second sets of RBs containing RBs of a common type, the second set of RBs different from the first set of RBs and the second set of RBs including less than the complete set of RBs constituting the carrier;

determining a difference between the first P CMAX value corresponding to the first set of RBs having the first set of subcarriers in the carrier for the subframe and the second P CMAX value corresponding to the second set of RBs having the second set of subcarriers in the same carrier for the subframe; and

sending a composite report for the subframe including at least the first P CMAX value corresponding to the first set of RBs having the first set of subcarriers in the carrier for the subframe and the second P CMAX value corresponding to the second set of RBs having the second set of subcarriers in the same carrier for the subframe to a base station in response to determining that the difference between the first P CMAX value and the second P CMAX value exceeds a threshold.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the first and second sets of RBs are partially overlapping in the frequency domain.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the first and second sets of RBs are different in the frequency domain.

4. The method of claim 1 further comprising sending an identification of the first and second sets of RBs to the base station.

5. The method of claim 1 ,

determining the first P CMAX value for the first set of RBs for a first temporal portion of the subframe,

determining the second P CMAX value for the second set of resource blocks (RBs) for a second temporal portion of the subframe,

wherein the first and second temporal portions of the subframe are non-overlapping.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising sending the composite report to the base station in response to receiving an explicit request from the base station for an enhanced P CMAX report.

7. The method of claim 6 , receiving the explicit request from the base station within a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) message or a medium access control (MAC) layer message or an radio resource control (RRC) message.

8. The method of claim 6 , receiving the explicit request from the base station within a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) message where the PDCCH message includes identification information identifying an uplink carrier, the first and second sets of RBs, and resource blocks on the uplink carrier on which the composite report is to be sent.

9. The method of claim 1 ,

wherein the second set of RBs does not overlap with the first set of RBs,

wherein the first and second sets of RBs constitute a complete set of physical uplink shared channel (PUSCH) RBs of the carrier.

10. The method of claim 9 further comprising:

communicating using a first radio access technology (RAT) on the carrier in the subframe;

communicating using a second RAT while communicating using the first RAT on the carrier in the subframe;

the first and second P CMAX values for the first and second sets of RBs are for the first RAT on the carrier in the subframe, wherein only the first P CMAX value for the first set of RBs is reduced by a particular power back-off value to satisfy power management requirements.

11. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

the first set of RBs includes at least two RBs,

determining the first P CMAX value includes determining a P CMAX value for each of the at least two RBs wherein the P CMAX value for one of the at least two RBs is lower than a P CMAX value for the other of the at least two RBs, and

sending the first P CMAX value to the base station includes reporting only the lower P CMAX value to the base station.

12. The method of claim 1 further comprising:

determining a first Power Headroom (PH) value corresponding to the first set of RBs;

determining a second PH value corresponding to the second set of RBs;

sending first PH value and the second PH value in the composite report.

13. The method of claim 1 wherein sending the composite report occurs during an initiation or termination of two simultaneous wireless device communication sessions.