Resource management in a cellular network

摘要

Resources are allocated for providing a multicast or broadcast service in a cellular single frequency network (SFN) comprising one or more base stations and a plurality of subscriber terminals. Information representative of transmission resource requirements for the multicast or broadcast service is received at a resource manager of the cellular network. The resource manager is then used to allocate resources across the cellular network, so as to balance those resource requirements across it. If resources necessary for a broadcast/multicast service exceed a threshold, then the resource manager checks to see if resources allocated to non-broadcast/multicast services, in the original SFN or a neighbouring SFN, can be reallocated. The broadcast/multicast data may be allocated to specific subframes of a dataframe and to the same number of subframes of each frame. Some subframes may be reserved for unicast services if the number of unicast terminals present exceeds a threshold.