WIRELESS NETWORK ARCHITECTURE AND METHOD FOR BASE STATION UTILIZATION

• US 20100157901A1
• Filed: 12/17/2009
• Published: 06/24/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 06/18/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Cellular Link Innovations LLC (Empire IP LLC)
• Original Assignee: Amichay Sanderovitz, Avi Steiner, Shaike Schatzberger
• Inventors: STEINER, Avi, SCHATZBERGER, Shaike, SANDEROVITZ, Amichay
• Granted Patent: US 8,620,230 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/328
• CPC Class Codes: H04B 7/022 Site diversity; Macro-diversity using two or more spaced independent antennas H04B7/04
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 52/40 during macro-diversity or soft handoff
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/04 Wireless resource allocation

Abstract

Wireless network system including a plurality of base stations each configured to manage active links to mobile stations within a range; and a controller configured to control the base stations to provide at least two of the active links from two different base stations simultaneously to a given mobile station in integral manner for joint processing.

Claims

1. A wireless network system comprising:

a plurality of network nodes, or base stations, each configured to manage active links to mobile stations within a range; and

a controller configured to control said base stations to provide at least two active links from at least two different network nodes simultaneously to a given mobile station in an integral manner for joint signal processing.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein one of said active links is a main link and others of said active links are helper links.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein said controller comprises a joint signal processing unit to jointly process said two active links to decode transmissions of said mobile station, and

wherein said joint signal processing unit is configured such that one of said active links is used to provide side information for a second of said active links.

4. The system of claim 1, wherein said controller comprises a joint signal processing unit to jointly process said two active links to decode transmissions of said mobile station, and

wherein a first of said base stations is configured to provide joint signal processing of a respective helping link and to forward a result thereof to a second of said base stations for further joint signal processing with a respective active link thereat.

5. The system of claim 1, further comprising three network nodes with helping links to said mobile station,

wherein said controller comprises a joint signal processing unit to jointly process said two active links to decode transmissions of said mobile station, and said controller is configured to transfer joint signal processing results from two of said base stations to a third of said network nodes for a further joint processing result with the respective active link of said third network node.

6. The system of claim 1, further comprising three network nodes with links to said mobile station, and wherein said controller comprises a joint signal processing unit to jointly process said two active links to decode transmissions of said mobile station, and

wherein said controller is configured to pass a joint processing result of a first of said network nodes to each of a second and third of said network nodes for further joint signal processing with the respective active links thereat.

7. The system of claim 1, further comprising a relay for relaying joint processing results between respective network nodes.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein said network nodes are base stations, and one of said base stations is configured as a master base station and at least one other of said base stations is configured as a slave base station, thereby to form a base station cluster.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein said master base station is configured to manage said active links within said cluster, thereby to provide transparent handover within said cluster.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein said cluster is configured with a single base station address to appear externally as a single base station.

11. The system of claim 9, wherein each base station in said cluster is configured to decode uplink information of all mobile stations which are clients of said cluster, wherein each base station is able to decode and forward resulting observations directly to the access server gateway or to the master base station, and

wherein the master base station is configured to decode remaining undecoded information by combining respective resulting observations.

12. The system of claim 11, further comprising a location estimator for estimating a location of a given mobile station based on said combining of respective resulting observations.

13. The system of claim 11, wherein at least some of said forwarding to said master base station is forwarded either via an intermediate base station or is via a backhaul channel.

14. The system of claim 11, wherein said links comprise uplinks and downlinks.

15. The system of claim 1, wherein said joint signal processing comprises joint compression of received signals.

16. The system of claim 1, wherein said joint signal processing comprises error correction decoding.

17. The system of claim 11, wherein clustering of base stations is carried out dynamically.

18. The system of claim 1, wherein one of said base stations is a helping base station, and wherein at least one of received signal compression and error correcting coding are jointly performed on a received signal, prior to forwarding to a destination node.

19. A method for wireless networking comprising:

providing a plurality of base stations to manage active links to mobile stations within a range; and

controlling said base stations to provide at least two active links from two different base stations simultaneously to a given mobile station in an integral manner for joint signal processing.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein said joint signal processing comprises joint received signal compression.

21. The method of claim 19, wherein the active links are downlinks, for downlink collaboration, and wherein the base stations are arranged in clusters, the active links being transmitted from base stations of a same cluster, the method comprising each of said base stations separately performing beamforming, the base stations applying a space-time coding permutation between themselves.

22. The method of claim 19, wherein the active links are downlinks, for downlink collaboration, and wherein the base stations are arranged in clusters, the active links being transmitted from base stations of a same cluster, the method comprising each of said base stations separately using a respectively different cyclic shift delay in downlink OFDM, to thereby avoid unintentional beamforming.

23. The method of claim 19, wherein the base stations are clustered into slave base stations and a master base station, said downlink being controlled by the master base station, each base station in the cluster having a same address such that collaboration within the cluster is transparent.