Patent attributes
Methods and apparatus are disclosed for allocating PUCCH resources for HARQ feedback so as to minimize the total number PUCCH resources that are allocated while avoiding resource collision. A base station in an uplink Pcell allocates resource sets for use by a plurality of user terminals for providing HARQ feedback to support downlink transmissions to the user terminals in the same transmission time interval. The base station configures a resource group for each user terminal. Each resource group comprises a predetermined number of the allocated resource sets. The base station sorts the user terminals in the order of priority from highest to lowest and selects, in order of priority, a resource set for each user terminal from its configured resource group. To select resources for the user terminal, the base station calculates a weight for each resource set available to the user terminal, and allocate an available resource set with minimum weight to the user terminal.
