Patent ID: 8711783

Claim:
A method for coordinating the hopping of a plurality of channel segments in a wireless communication system, comprising: determining, at a frame processing unit, a number of channel segments to include in each of a plurality of frames; dividing, at the frame processing unit, the frames into a plurality of resource zones to be used for hopping the plurality of channel segments, each resource zone containing a different plurality of contiguous frequency resource channels; assigning, at the frame processing unit, each channel segment to one of the resource zones, such that each channel segment is assigned to a different resource zone; selecting, at the frame processing unit, a first frequency resource channel within each assigned resource zone for transmitting the each channel segment in the assigned resource zone during a first frame of the plurality of frames; and selecting, at the frame processing unit, a second frequency resource channel within each assigned resource zone for transmitting the each channel segment in the assigned resource zone during a second frame following the first frame, wherein each first frequency resource channel is different than the corresponding second frequency resource channel.