Today, an increasing number of readily deployable wireless transceiver devices (e.g., femtocell and picocell base stations), operating on licensed frequency spectra, are being utilized by network subscribers within the coverage areas of larger wireless network cells (e.g., macrocell and microcell base stations) to improve the quality and/or capacity of wireless communications for various subscriber site locations. Smaller cells play an increasingly significant role in reducing metropolitan and residential area traffic experienced by larger, often overburdened, network cells. These transceiver devices may be distributed in such a way as to provide short-range wireless communications services to single-family homes, public businesses (e.g., such as Starbucks® coffee shops or McDonalds® restaurants), to particular floors within an office building, or any other public or private entity location desiring improved and/or localized cellular service.
As would be understood by those skilled in the Art, in wireless service provider networks, macrocells typically provide the largest wireless coverage area for licensed frequency spectra, followed by microcells, then picocells, and lastly femtocells, which provide the smallest coverage area of the common network cell types. By way of example, in a typical wireless data communications network, a macrocell base station may provide a wireless coverage area ranging between one to five kilometers, radially from the center of the cell; a microcell base station may provide a coverage area ranging between one-half to one kilometer radially; a picocell base station may provide a coverage area ranging between 100 to 500 meters radially; and a femtocell base station may provide a coverage area of less than 100 meters radially. Each of these network cells or base station types is generally configured to connect with a particular service provider network using various common wireline communications technologies, including, but not limited to: fiber optic, DSL, powerline, and/or coaxial cable (i.e., joining cells to a backhaul network).
The fundamental and reciprocal relationship between cell coverage area and data throughput for a given amount of radio spectrum and signal energy drives modern high throughput networks towards these small coverage footprint microcells, picocells, and femtocells. Thus, it is anticipated that with the evolution of next generation wireless communications (e.g., with 4G wireless communications deployment), smaller cells (also referred to herein as “transceiver devices”) may eventually be the predominant service providing instruments utilized in most heavily populated geographic regions of a wireless network. In this developing scenario, groups of smaller cells may be collectively viewed as “layers” of cells that supply the lion's share of a particular service provider's network capacity, whereas the network's larger cells may be primarily responsible for providing overarching coverage to the underlying intra-network of smaller cells, in order to facilitate service continuity between smaller cells and amongst cells and cell layers.
These cell layers and smaller cells can reduce periods of network congestion created by traditional network architecture which bottlenecked a majority of regional subscriber communications through a small number of larger network cells (e.g., macrocells or microcells). This congestion reducing technique can improve a service provider network's Quality of Service (QOS) as well as network service subscribers' collective Quality of Experience (QOE) within a particular portion of a data communications network. Negative effects associated with poor QOS and poor QOE (e.g., conditions largely caused by congestion and/or interference), which can be mitigated by adding a substantial number of short-range wireless transceiver devices to network infrastructure, may include: queuing delay, data loss, as well as blocking of new and existing network connections for certain network subscribers.
As the number of layers in a network increases (i.e., the number of macrocells, microcells, picocells, and femtocells in a network), it become increasingly important to manage the frequency resources shared by the components in a network. By way of example, cells with overlapping coverage areas might share a fixed number of wireless communication channels, e.g., 100 channels. A radio access node may require more resources depending on the time of day, geographic location, node size, etc. Thus it would be desirable to allocate resources most efficiently depending on the usage demand.
Prior art solutions include developing static channel assignments and dynamic channel assignments. Typical static channel assignment algorithms must err on the conservative side to reduce the probability of cochannel interference between neighboring access nodes. This can lead to conditions where too few or too many channels are pre-provisioned to a set of radio access nodes, and the system may not react quickly to exception scenarios. Typical dynamic channel assignment processes must similarly pre-provision a pool of applicable channels based on broad assumptions of local traffic patterns. In the case of large coverage area macrocells, this sort of statistical pre-provisioning, while not optimal, can work based on the large area and number of users served. Statistical pre-provisioning falls apart without sufficiently high population and diversity of uncorrelated users. Small footprint microcell, picocell, and femtocell radio access nodes will provide coverage over much smaller service regions and they will service fewer users per cell. As a result, it would be difficult if not impossible to efficiently incorporate an individual user's home transceiver device into a dynamic channel assignment.
The smaller coverage areas provided by these high throughput cells (e.g., microcells, picocells, and femtocells) are expected to exhibit strong usage patters as a function of geographical location and time of day as well as similar usage patterns over week-long and longer time periods. By way of example, a small cell site (e.g., a microcell, picocell, or femtocell) serving a metropolitan train station may be heavily loaded during commute hours as commuters wait for trains but then may remain relatively lightly loaded during other hours. Similarly, a picocell or femtocell serving an office building may be lightly loaded during a commute hour but would remain heavily loaded throughout the working hours. Thus, there is a need for a frequency resource allocation method that takes into account local and actual traffic patterns to predict future needs and to serve as an input to an automated radio resource management algorithm.