Patent ID: 7756208

Claim:
A multicarrier base station for communicating with subscriber stations of a plurality of bandwidth profiles including full-bandwidth subscriber stations and narrower bandwidth subscriber stations, the base station comprising: physical-layer circuitry comprising separate functional elements for each of the bandwidth profiles configured to generate a decoded bit stream for an associated one of the bandwidth profiles from frequency domain samples, each of the bandwidth profiles being associated with a different fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) size, and a mapper to map frequency-domain samples associated with subcarriers of a multicarrier communication channel to the functional elements for separately processing by one of the functional elements based on subchannel subcarrier allocations associated with a bandwidth profile, wherein sets of subcarriers of a single multicarrier communication channel are allocated for simultaneous communication within a single Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing Access (OFDMA) symbol to the subscriber stations based on the bandwidth profile associated with each of the subscriber stations, wherein the physical layer circuitry is configured to communicate with a full-bandwidth subscriber station using a full set of the subcarriers of the multicarrier communication channel within another OFDMA symbol within a frame, and to simultaneously communicate with two or more narrower-bandwidth subscriber stations using allocated subcarriers within the single OFDMA symbol within the frame, wherein a number of subcarriers within the set that are allocated to each subscriber station depends on the bandwidth profile associated with each subscriber station.