Patent ID: 7110462
Filing Date: 2006-09-19
Classification: H04L

Abstract:
1. A method of communicating digital data information from a plurality of user terminal transmitters located in a plurality of antenna beam coverage regions to a receiver with a multibeam antenna, wherein each user terminal transmitter is associated with a beam coverage region, comprising the steps of: assigning with a random selection a plurality of multiple access channels that belong to a mutually orthogonal set to the plurality of user terminal transmitters within an antenna beam coverage region, and reusing the same multiple access channels with random assignments in adjacent beam coverage regions, and each multiple access channel is associated with a reuse factor, which is defined by the number of user terminal transmitter assignments in different beam coverage regions divided by the total number of beam coverage regions, and at least one multiple access channel is reused in all beam coverage regions so that its reuse factor is unity; adding, at the user terminal transmitter, error-correction coding to the digital data information to provide coded information; interleaving, at the user terminal transmitter, the coded information among a plurality of data groups; inserting in time to each data group, at the user terminal transmitter, a reference signal associated with the beam coverage region of the user terminal transmitter to provide a multiplexed signal; modulating, at the user terminal transmitter, the multiplexed signal with a multiple access waveform associated with the assigned multiple access channel to provide a multiple access signal; transmitting, at the user terminal transmitter, the multiple access signal; receiving, at the multibeam antenna of the receiver, the multiple access signals from the plurality of user terminal transmitters so as to provide a plurality of antenna beam signals; combining, at the receiver, the antenna beam signals to provide a combined signal associated with a user terminal transmitter, thereby reducing interference from user terminal transmitters assigned to different beam coverage regions; deinterleaving and decoding, at the receiver, the combined signal to recover the user terminal transmitter digital data information, and wherein the assigning step further includes different selections for successive data groups.