Patent ID: 8315240

Claim:
A method of indicating an uplink data rate for a first transmission segment in an OFDM wireless communication environment, comprising operating a communications device to perform the steps of: determining a first rate option to be used in the first transmission segment; encoding information bits to coded bits and mapping coded bits to modulation symbols in accordance with the first rate option; identifying a first predetermined subset and a second predetermined subset of tone-symbols in the first transmission segment as a function of the first rate option, wherein a tone-symbol is a tone in an OFDM symbol period and tones are indexed in a logical order; mapping the modulation symbols to the tone-symbols of the first transmission segment; power-scaling a modulation symbol mapped to a tone-symbol of the first predetermined subset with a first parameter; power-scaling a modulation symbol mapped to a tone-symbol of the second predetermined subset with a second parameter, the second parameter being different from the first parameter; transmitting the first transmission segment; wherein said first transmission segment includes multiple tone-symbols in each of a plurality of consecutive symbol transmission time periods; and wherein said first predetermined subset of tone-symbols includes more tone-symbols than said second predetermined subset of tone-symbols.