Contention Free Inter-Cellular Slot Reservation

A distributed reservation protocol tailored for cellular wireless networks is presented that facilitates contention free inter-cellular slot allocation and reservation. While reserved slots are protected from inter-cell interference by a busy burst enabled reservation protocol, collisions due to simultaneously accessed unreserved slots by neighboring cells are mitigated by means of resource partitioning patterns. Shifting these partitioning patterns over time allows each cell to successively probe all slots. This ensures that full frequency reuse is maintained, in the way that all cells may utilize the entire frequency band. In effect a contention free inter-cellular slot allocation policy is established that in a distributed manner dynamically controls the spatial reuse, in terms of concurrently accessed radio resources by neighboring cells.