Patent ID: 8310998

Claim:
A method of signalling resource allocation data in a communication system which uses a plurality of sub-carriers arranged in a sequence of chunks, the method comprising: receiving an allocation of said sub-carriers for each of a plurality of user devices; processing the received allocations to determine, for each user device, data identifying a start chunk and an end chunk within said sequence of chunks, which depend upon the sub-carriers allocated to the user device, wherein the data identifying the start chunk and the end chunk comprises a start chunk number and a number of consecutive chunks between the start chunk and the end chunk; generating different resource allocation data for each of said user devices using said data identifying the corresponding start chunk and end chunk determined by said processing, wherein said resource allocation data comprises a unique value representing the corresponding start chunk number, and the number of consecutive chunks between the corresponding start chunk and the corresponding end chunk; and signaling the respective resource allocation data, comprising said unique value, to each of said plurality of user devices, wherein said unique value is defined by at least one of the following equations: x=N ( P− 1)+ O; and x=N ( N −( P− 1))+( N− 1 −O ), wherein x is the unique value, N is the number of chunks in said sequence, O is the start chunk number, and P is the number of consecutive chunks.