Patent ID: 7436802

Claim:
A frequency hopping method in an OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) system, comprising: (a) detecting a mutual interference degree between different cells, and determining whether to use a different frequency hopping pattern for each of the different cells for interference averaging according to the mutual interference degree; (b) determining a number P of the different frequency hopping patterns needed for satisfying the results of (a) between all the cells in the system; (c) generating the frequency hopping patterns of at least the number P determined in (b), and allocating one of the generated frequency hopping patterns to each cell in the system so as to satisfy the results of (a), wherein each frequency hopping pattern defines a hopping sequence for each channel within the corresponding cell, and subchannels of each channel hop with respect to time according to the hopping sequence, and wherein the frequency hopping patterns are generated such that a number of frequency collisions between two channels making up a channel pair in two different frequency hopping patterns is the same for each channel pair in the two different frequency hopping patterns; and (d) frequency-hopping the channels in each cell according to the frequency hopping pattern allocated in (c).