APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS, BASE STATION, AND APPARATUS AT USER EQUIPMENT SIDE

• US 20180063855A1
• Filed: 10/23/2015
• Published: 03/01/2018
• Est. Priority Date: 03/30/2015
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.)
• Inventors: XU, Xiaodong, WANG, Ce, XIAO, Yunqiu, YANG, Chengcheng
• Granted Patent: US 10,568,110 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/12 Wireless traffic scheduling
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/121 for groups of terminals or users
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 72/23 in the downlink direction of a wireless link, i.e. towards a terminal

Abstract

An apparatus and method for wireless communications, a base station, and a user equipment side apparatus in a communication system. The wireless communications apparatus includes: one or more scheduling units configured to, responsive to transmission demands of plural user equipments managed by the apparatus, judge, based on user equipment clusters to which the plural user equipments belongs, whether the plural user equipments can reuse same physical transmission resources or not, and schedule, based on a judgment result, corresponding physical transmission resources for the plural user equipments; and a signaling generating unit configured to generate, based on resource scheduling of one or more scheduling units, downlink control information containing resource scheduling information to apply same to the plural user equipments, the user equipments including D2D user equipment pairs and honeycomb user equipments, the plural user equipments being divided into at least one user equipment cluster in advance based on geographic positions.

Claims

1. An apparatus for wireless communications, comprising:

one or more scheduling units, configured to;

in response to transmission requirements of a plurality of user equipments managed by the apparatus, determine, based on user equipment clusters which the plurality of user equipments belong to, whether the plurality of user equipments are capable of multiplexing same physical transmission resources; and

schedule corresponding physical transmission resources for the plurality of user equipments based on a result of determining; and

a signaling generating unit, configured to generate, based on the resources scheduling of the one or more scheduling units, downlink control information containing resource scheduling information to be used for the plurality of user equipments,

wherein the user equipments comprise D2D user equipment pairs and cellular user equipments, and the plurality of user equipments are grouped into at least one user equipment cluster based on geographical locations in advance.

2. The apparatus according to claim 1, wherein the resource scheduling comprises allocating of physical resource blocks, and the one or more scheduling units are configured to schedule same physical resource blocks for at least part of the plurality of user equipments, and the signaling generating unit is further configured to generate same downlink control information for the user equipments multiplexing the same physical resource blocks and map the downlink control information onto same physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) resources.

3. The apparatus according to claim 2, wherein the signaling generating unit is further configured to configure a same DP-RNTI for the D2D user equipment pairs multiplexing the same physical resource blocks, and scramble the downlink control information with the DP-RNTI.

4. The apparatus according to claim 3, wherein in the case that a cellular user equipment and a D2D user equipment pair multiplex resource blocks, the signaling generating unit is configured to configure the DP-RNTI to be the same as a C-RNTI of the cellular user equipment.

5. The apparatus according to claim 3, further comprising:

a transceiving unit, configured to transmit, to the part of the plurality of user equipments, an instruction of the DP-RNTI configured for the part of the plurality of user equipments.

6. The apparatus according to claim 5, wherein the signaling generating unit is further configured to generate RRC signaling for the corresponding user equipments, with the RRC signaling containing the instruction of the DP-RNTI configured for the user equipments.

7. The apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising:

a dividing unit, configured to divide a coverage range of a base station antenna serving the user equipments into a plurality of regions according to geographical locations, and take the user equipments in each of the plurality of regions as one user equipment cluster.

8. The apparatus according to claim 7, wherein the one or more scheduling units are further configured to:

in the case that two D2D user equipment pairs are located in two different regions, determine, further based on a distance between the two D2D user equipment pairs, whether the two D2D user equipment pairs are capable of multiplexing same physical transmission resources, or in the case that the D2D user equipment pair and the cellular user equipment are located in two different regions, determine, further based on a distance between the D2D user equipment pair and the cellular user equipment, whether the D2D user equipment pair and the cellular user equipment are capable of multiplexing same physical transmission resources.

9. The apparatus according to claim 7, wherein the dividing unit is configured to group the user equipments within coverage of a same beam into one user equipment cluster in the case of beamforming.

10. The apparatus according to claim 7, wherein the dividing unit is configured to group a user equipment within the coverage range and user equipments which are located outside of the coverage range and receive a synchronization signal and control signaling from the user equipment within the coverage range into one user equipment cluster.

11. The apparatus according to claim 1, further comprising:

a transceiving unit, configured to receive requests for using physical transmission resources from the plurality of user equipments and transmit the downlink control information to the plurality of user equipments.

12. The apparatus according to claim 11, wherein the one or more scheduling units comprise:

a ranking module, configured to rank the user equipments from which the requests are received according to communication priority levels of the user equipments;

a user equipment list generating module, configured to generate user equipment lists, the user equipments in each of which are capable of multiplexing same physical transmission resources, wherein the user equipments are filled into the user equipment list according to a sequence of the priority levels; and

an allocating module, configured to allocate available physical transmission resources to the user equipments in each of the generated user equipment lists respectively.

13. The apparatus according to claim 12, wherein the one or more scheduling units further comprise:

a timer provided for each of the available physical transmission resources, and when the timer expires, the user equipment list generating module stops the generating of the corresponding user equipment list, and the allocating module allocates the available physical transmission resource to the user equipments in the user equipment list.

15. A base station comprising the apparatus according to claim 1.

14. A method for wireless communications, comprising:

in response to transmission requirements of a plurality of user equipments, determining, based on user equipment clusters which the plurality of user equipments belong to, whether the plurality of user equipments are capable of multiplexing same physical transmission resources;

scheduling, based on a result of the determining, physical transmission resources for the plurality of user equipments; and

generating, based on the resources scheduling, downlink control information containing resource scheduling information to be used for the plurality of user equipments;

wherein the user equipments comprise D2D user equipment pairs and cellular user equipments, and the plurality of user equipments are grouped into at least one user equipment cluster based on geographical locations in advance.

16. An apparatus on a user equipment side in a communication system, comprising:

one or more processors, configured to;

parse control signaling from a base station and determine a DP-RNTI for the apparatus, and

perform blind detection on a physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) from the base station using the DP-RNTI, to detect downlink control information for the apparatus and determine physical transmission resources scheduled by the base station for the apparatus,

wherein the physical transmission resources are used for a D2D communication between the user equipment and another user equipment, and the user equipment and at least another D2D user equipment managed by the base station share the DP-RNTI.