CELL IDENTIFICATION BASED ON DISTANCE

摘要

The present invention relates generally to the problem of determining the identity of a cell for e.g. cell handoff or automatic frequency planning, and more particularly to the problem of determining the true identity of a cell when only the transmission frequency and a non-unique identity code is known. A candidate list is created for each cell. This candidate list is created based on a function of various elements e.g. distance, transmission power, cell type, and antenna placement. The cells are then ranked on the candidate list based on this function. When a particular frequency/code combination is detected, the candidate list is then consulted, and the highest ranking cell with the same frequency/code combination is chosen as being the signal source. In an alternative embodiment the neighbor cell list is used to create the candidate list. If there are no matches on this list for the detected frequency/code combination, then the neighbors of the cells on the candidate list are also added to the candidate list which is then checked for a match.