Patent ID: 7646751

Claim:
A method for use in a radio base station for exchanging data between a radio equipment control (REC) node and a radio equipment (RE) node for transceiving information over a radio interface using multiple antenna carriers, the REC node being separate from and coupled to the RE node by a transmission link, comprising to steps of: generating control information and user information for transmission over the transmission link from one of the REC node and the RE node to the other, the control information including multiple different control flows, each control flow corresponding to multiple control bits, and the user information including multiple data flows, each data flow corresponding to multiple data bits associated with one antenna for one radio carrier; formatting the control information and user information into multiple time division multiplexed (TDM) frames, where each TDM frame has at least 256 bits and includes a control time slot for the multiple different control flows and multiple data time slots for the user information with each data time slot corresponding to a data flow of one of the antenna carriers, wherein the control information includes physical layer 1 (L1) signaling information that configures how to extract and interpret the multiple different control flows included in the control time slot; and transmitting frames over the transmission link to the other node.