Patent ID: 8619688

Claim:
For use in a wireless communication network, a mobile station capable of communicating with at least one base station in the wireless network, the mobile station comprising: a plurality of antennas; and a controller coupled to the plurality of antennas, the controller configured to receive an allocation of a set of sub-bands including at least one sub-band for use in communicating with the at least one base station, wherein the controller is configured to receive at least one resource allocation message from the at least one base station, the at least one resource allocation message comprising: a sub-band index (SBI) field, and at least one message field comprising a contiguous allocation indicator, wherein the controller is configured to determine the set of sub-bands including at least one sub-band using the SBI field and the at least one message field, and wherein the controller is configured to use the contiguous allocation indicator to interpret the SBI field according to at least one of: a contiguous indexing scheme and a non-contiguous indexing scheme.