Patent ID: 8059577

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a signal at an input of a relay node in a communications system, where the signal comprises a plurality of subchannels; demultiplexing the subchannels comprising the signal into a plurality of separate signal streams; reassigning at least one signal stream originally contained in a first subchannel received at the input of the relay node to a second subchannel for the purpose of transmission, where the first subchannel is different from the second subchannel, and where reassigning the at least one signal stream comprises using channel information derived from at least one of input subchannels and output subchannels of the relay node; and transmitting the reassigned signal stream in the second subchannel, where the channel information comprises at least one of power, rate, and transport information from the at least one of the input subchannels and output subchannels of the relay node.