Abstract: An apparatus and method are provided that can effectively improve a paging scheme of a traditional cellular system. Basically, the apparatus includes a controller (cell load monitor) which operates to determine when a paging distribution handler should forward a low priority page request to a mobile station in order to decrease a processing (blind) load on a processor and to decrease a load on the air interface resources. The controller utilizes a current paging load (first embodiment) and/or a current traffic load (second embodiment) as a factor to help determine when the low priority page request should be forwarded to the mobile station.

Abstract: The present invention is related to managing resources in a radio communication network. The radio communication network comprises a first set of equipment and a second set of equipment. The first set of equipment is initially allocated (301) to serve a first call. Equipment reallocation (303) is initiated, whereby the second set of equipment is allocated to serve the first call and the first set of equipment is released from the first call, upon determining (302), according to a predetermined rule based on differences in functional capabilities of the first set of equipment and the second set of equipment, that it is desirable to serve the first call using the second set of equipment instead of the first set of equipment even though the first set of equipment is able to continue serving the first call.