Patent ID: 8467396

Claim:
A method of protecting data to be transmitted in a communication system, the method comprising: dividing a communication channel resource over which the data is to be transmitted in a frame time slot into regions, wherein the communication channel resource comprises multiple sub-carriers in a spectrum and each region is a different temporal position within one of the sub-carriers; separating the data into data portions, each data portion able to be transmitted over one of the regions; ranking the regions based on the transmission reliability thereon; prioritizing the data portions based on the importance of the data portions; and mapping the prioritized data portions to the ranked regions such that more important data portions are mapped to more reliable regions and less important data portions are mapped to less reliable regions, wherein the regions are ranked such that regions at edges of the spectrum are less reliable than regions more proximate to a center of the spectrum, the data portions being mapped such that the more important data portions are mapped to the regions more proximate to the center of the spectrum and the less important data portions are mapped to the regions at the edges of the spectrum.