Patent ID: 7792205

Claim:
A method for handling repeated, randomized and encoded frame control header (FCH) data of a downlink signal in a wireless communication system, comprising: applying a convolutional coding to a randomizing sequence, which is used to randomize the encoded FCH data in generating the downlink signal, to produce an encoded randomizing sequence longer than the randomizing sequence; using the convolutional encoded sequence to de-randomize the encoded FCH data to form a de-randomized sequence of soft bit symbols indicating a likelihood of each bit at one of two binary states, wherein the de-randomized sequence includes a plurality of repetitive segments each corresponding to a common sequence; combining soft bit symbols of the different repetitive segments, bit by bit, to form a combined sequence where each bit is a soft bit symbol which is a sum of soft bit symbols of corresponding bit positions from the repetitive segments, wherein a number of bits of the combined sequence is equal to a number of bits in the de-randomized sequence divided by a number of the repetitive segments in the de-randomized sequence, and wherein each soft bit symbol in the combined sequence indicates a likelihood of each bit at one of two binary states; and using a decoder to perform Viterbi decoding on the combined sequence to produce a decoded FCH sequence having binary bit symbols.