Patent ID: 8457081

Claim:
A transmission method for a base station in a cellular communication network of base stations and mobile stations, the method comprising: forming a plurality of frames of fixed time length, each frame containing a plurality of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols; forming a plurality of first frames and a plurality of second frames among the plurality of frames, wherein: each of the first frames contains time-frequency resources used for content multicasting or broadcasting (MB) via a single frequency network (SFN), the SFN comprising base stations in multiple cells transmitting the same MB content using OFDM and employing a same time and frequency resource; and each of the second frames contains time-frequency resources used for data unicasting without the use of a SFN; transmitting a sequence of consecutive frames comprising first frames carrying MB content and second frames carrying unicasting data, wherein the first frames and the second frames are intermixed in accordance with an intermixing configuration pattern and the intermixing configuration pattern is predetermined or configured at the time of transmission; and transmitting a scheduling signal containing scheduling information, wherein the scheduling information includes a bit-map indicating the intermixing configuration pattern by using a “1” in the bit-map to represent a first frame and a “0” in the bit-map to represent a second frame, or a “0” in the bit-map to represent a first frame and a “1” in the bit-map to represent a second frame.