Patent ID: 8265021

Claim:
A method for transmission in a communication system, the method comprising: assigning, at a base station, uplink (UL) physical resource block (PRB) indices to a subset of units of user equipment (UE) in a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) communication system extending between the base station and a plurality of units of user equipment; for each user equipment, calculating, at the base station, an index triple (K PHICH,1 , K PHICH,2 , K PHICH,3 ) for three repetitions of a Physical Hybrid Automatic Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) Indicator Channel (PHICH) signal to be transmitted to the user equipment, with K PHICH,i being a PHICH index indicating a PHICH resource for transmitting the i-th repetition of the PHICH signal to the user equipment, and i=1, 2, 3; receiving data packets from a unit of user equipment transmitted via the PRBs indicated by the PRB indices assigned to the user equipment; forming multiple PHICH groups by mapping a plurality of PHICH resources to multiple sets of resource elements, with one PHICH group corresponding to one set of resource elements, each PHICH group comprising more than two PHICH resources, and each PHICH resource being indicated by a physical resource index pair ( n PHICH group , n PHICH sec ) , where n PHICH group is the PHICH group index and n PHICH sec is the PHICH resource index within the PHICH group; determining a physical resource index pair for each repetition of the PHICH signal based on the corresponding PHICH index; and transmitting each repetition of the PHICH signal to the user equipment by using the PHICH resource indicated by the physical resource index pair corresponding to the repetition.