Patent ID: 9510368
Filing Date: 2016-11-29
CPC Classification: H04W

Claim Text:
1. A method in a base station for providing feedback to a plurality of user equipments on reception status of data transmitted by the plurality of user equipments, the base station and the plurality of user equipments being comprised in a wireless communication system adapted for contention based transmissions, wherein a common identifier that identifies the plurality of user equipments is used to identify contention based grants on a physical downlink control channel, the method comprising: sending a first contention based grant to the plurality of user equipments, wherein the plurality of user equipments is identified by the common identifier; upon successful reception of data from at least one of the plurality of user equipments identified by the common identifier in response to the first contention based grant, providing dedicated acknowledgement feedback, by including an indication of an identity of the at least one of the plurality of user equipments from which data was successfully received, in a message addressed to the same common identifier as used in the first contention based grant on the physical downlink control channel, wherein the message addressed to the common identifier that includes the dedicated acknowledgement feedback is a second contention based grant that is transmitted on the physical downlink control channel, wherein the second contention based grant comprises a resource allocation field and at least one acknowledgement, ACK, field, and wherein the at least one ACK field comprises an indication of the identity of the at least one of the plurality of user equipments comprising a plural number of bits; sending a third contention based grant to the plurality of user equipments; and upon receiving no data from any of the plurality of user equipments in response to the third contention based grant, transmitting a fourth contention based grant that is transmitted on the physical downlink control channel and addressed to the common identifier, the fourth contention based grant comprising at least one ACK field comprising a special value that is reserved to indicate that no data was received comprising the same plural number of bits as the ACK field of the second contention based grant.