Patent ID: 7894449

Claim:
A method, comprising: encoding an identification of a subscriber station and its connections in a data frame for transmission in a wireless communication network comprising at least one base station and at least one subscriber station, the encoding comprising: specifying a subscriber station identification in the data frame to identify the one or more subscriber stations for which contents of the data frame are destined; and specifying a connection identification in the data frame to identify one or more connections of the one or more identified subscriber stations to which the contents of the data frame belong; and wherein specifying the subscriber station identification and the connection identification is specified in a single stage in the following number of bits: B 1 =greatest integer [log 2(M+M1+M2)N], specifying the subscriber station identification and the connection identification is specified in two stages requiring the following number of bits for the subscriber station identification: B 2 =greatest integer [log 2(M+M1+M2)], or specifying the subscriber station identification and the connection identification is specified in two stages requiring the following number of bits for the connection identification: B 3 =greatest integer [log 2(N)], in which M is the maximum possible number of subscriber stations in a coverage region of the at least one base station, M1 is the number of multicast connections, M2 is the number of broadcast connections and N is the maximum possible number of connections per subscriber station.