Patent ID: 8750887

Claim:
A method of scheduling physical downlink shared channel muting in a telephonic system including plural base stations, each base station serving at least one user equipment, the method comprising the steps of: receiving from a base station a signal indicating parameters for at least one muting configuration; receiving from the base station an enable/disable signal having a number of bits equal to the number of muting configurations, wherein the parameters for each muting configuration include a corresponding muting periodicity and a corresponding subframe offset, the muting periodicity and the subframe offset being jointly encoded; determining that a physical downlink shared channel from the base station is muted according to one of the muting configurations if a corresponding bit of the enable/disable signal has a first digital state; and determining that a physical downlink shared channel from the base station is not muted according to one of the muting configurations if a corresponding bit of the enable/disable signal has a second digital state opposite to the first digital state.