Method and base station for providing an estimate of interference and noise power of an uplink resource block

Abstract

A method in a base station (110) for providing an estimate of interference and noise power of an uplink resource block. The base station (110) is comprised in a cellular communications network (100). The base station (110) receives (401, 901) on multiple antenna elements (112a-c) of a receiver antenna (112) a signal comprising interference and noise. The base station (110) calculates (402, 902) an interference and noise covariance matrix for the resource block based on the received signal. The base station (110) then calculates (903, 403) the estimate based on the calculated interference and noise covariance matrix, the number of the multiple antenna elements (112a-c) of the receiver antenna (112) and a channel covariance matrix for a virtual user equipment. The provided estimate enables an interference and noise measure when Interference Rejection Combining (!RC) is applied in the uplink. Thereby more efficient use of uplink Frequency Selective Scheduling (FSS) together with uplink IRC and improved performance in the cellular communications network is enabled.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.