CONTROLLING GROUPED COMMUNICATION DEVICES

摘要

A cellular telecommunications network architecture is described where certain communication devices are configured to assist the network to improve coverage in regions of poor radio conditions. In certain embodiments, appropriate communication devices are selected to act as a dynamic, out-of-band coverage extensions. The selection of appropriate communication devices is facilitated by assigning the candidate communication devices to clusters where any one cluster has no substantial influence on network performance in any other cluster and then further segmenting each cluster into one or more sub-groups by constraining a maximum transmission power of one or more of the first communication device in each cluster while maintaining one or more network performance metrics. The computational task of searching for an optimal configuration of (candidate) communication devices is thus reduced to a series of simpler computations for a plurality of sub-groups.