Abstract: Resources are reserved or otherwise allocated in a mobile radio communications system in an efficient and timely fashion. In general, the amount of resources that will likely be necessary to support a connection with a mobile station is predicted before those resources are actually required. More specifically, an unknown value of a dynamic connection parameter, like a number of radio paths likely to be involved in supporting the connection, is predicted. In the handover context, these radio paths might correspond to paths with different base stations (as in hard and soft handover) or to paths with different base station sectors (as in softer handover). The underlying resources are allocated using the predicted connection parameter and may include, for example, data processing and memory hardware resources, software resources, radio resources, etc.