British Telecommunications Public Limited Company

Sverrir Olafsson

Maziar Nekovee

Choong M Chin

A method allocates transmission channels to transmit nodes in a wireless network, the network comprising receive nodes and respective transmit nodes. Each receive node receives a data signal from its respective transmit node and is subject to interference from other transmission from other transmit nodes. The method includes: (i) determining the communication link gain of a data signal transmitted via each of communication paths; (ii) for each of the receive nodes, forming a set of the transmit nodes from which the receive node can tolerate interfering transmissions, (iii) collecting the formed set of transmit nodes from step (ii) for each receive node, and using the formed sets to generate a preferred set of transmit node and receive node pairs; and (iv) allocating a communication channel to the transmit nodes contained in the preferred set.

Optimising communication links

A multicast system is described in which a mechanism for suppressing feedback involves the receivers using an optimized timer function for selecting a backoff delay time before sending feedback, and canceling their feedback if in the meantime they detect that another receiver has sent a duplicate feedback message. The timer function is optimised, taking into account both the expected number of feedback messages and the extra latency which is introduced by the feedback mechanism, by minimizing an objective function expressed in terms of both these two aspects.

Growing community of inventors

Ipswich, United Kingdom

Sverrir Olafsson