Patent ID: 6865393

Claim:
In a wireless communication system which supports a plurality of modulation/coding rates, a method for transmitting signals comprising the steps of: determining a reference resource size for each of a plurality of planned links in the communication system; determining a modulation/coding rate for each of the planned links, each modulation/coding rate being associated with a minimum resource size; and determining excess resources based upon differences between the reference resource size and the minimum resource size for each of the planned links; distributing the excess resources among the planned links based on a system criterion; wherein the step of determining a modulation/coding rate comprises the steps of: determining the modulation/coding rate for each of the planned links from a predetermined set of modulation/coding rates, the predetermined set including a maximum modulation/coding rate; and wherein the step of distributing comprises the step of: identifying a non-maximum group of planned links which are not set to the maximum modulation/coding rate; identifying one of the planned links in the non-maximum group which has the highest signal quality; and distributing the excess resources such that the one of the planned links is modulated at the maximum modulation/coding rate.