Patent ID: 8780813

Claim:
A wireless communication method in which a base station communicates with a plurality of subscriber stations in units of frames, each frame being configured to have a certain duration in time comprising a plurality of symbols, a certain frequency bandwidth comprising a total number of subcarriers, and at least one subcarrier allocation scheme for grouping the subcarriers into sub-channels, each frame containing a burst allocated to each of the subscriber stations respectively and each burst occupying a corresponding subset of said symbols and sub-channels, each of the subscriber stations being informed of the characteristics of its allocated burst by a respective control message comprising one or more fields sent from the base station; the method comprising: varying the lengths of one or more fields comprised in the control messages to define the characteristics of the burst, in dependence upon the frame duration currently in use; wherein each control message includes a first field defining a symbol offset of the burst, and a number of bits in this field is set in dependence upon the frame duration and the subcarrier allocation scheme.