Abstract: A wireless telephone system provides telecommunications services for personal wireless telephone sets over an area which is divided into service cells. Each of the cells is defined by reception characteristics of a plurality of radio base stations within the cell. The telephone system includes a service controller and a port being wireline connected between each radio base station and the service controller. The service controller selects radio base stations for setting up radio links with wireless sets of calling or called persons. A base station which serves a wireless set and surrounding idle base stations monitor strengths of radio signals received from the wireless set and report running averages of the monitored signal strengths to the service controller. Movement of the wireless set from one cell to another cell during a call is detected as a drop in the running average reported by the serving base station.

Abstract: A method of using the existing radio resources to automatically determine the current cellular topology is described. Wireless basestations are placed into a mode where they can transmit a signal which can be received by all of the base stations in range of the transmitting basestation. Each base station in the system serially broadcast a signal which is received by all other basestations within the range of the transmitting basestation. Each of the receiving radios determines the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) at which they received the transmitted signal. The RSSI values are used to determine which base stations are physically co-located into cells and then determine the relative locations of the cells to each other.