Patent ID: 8009660

Claim:
A multi-carrier, multi-cell, wireless communication network, comprising: a plurality of base stations, each base station associated with one of a plurality of cells, having a transmitter that is synchronized in time and frequency with transmitters in other base stations in the plurality of cells, and configured to transmit cell-specific pilot subcarriers, cell-specific data subcarriers, common pilot subcarriers, and common data subcarriers within a same frequency band that is divided into a plurality of subcarriers, wherein: the cell-specific pilot subcarriers and the cell-specific data subcarriers contain information concerning a specific cell, wherein at least some of the cell-specific pilot subcarriers are not aligned in frequency subcarrier index with cell-specific pilot subcarriers transmitted by the other base stations and at least some of the cell-specific data subcarriers are not aligned in frequency subcarrier index with cell-specific data subcarriers transmitted by the other base stations; the common pilot subcarriers and the common data subcarriers contain information common to the plurality of cells, wherein the common pilot subcarriers are aligned in frequency subcarrier index with common pilot subcarriers transmitted by the other base stations and the common data subcarriers are aligned in frequency subcarrier index with common data subcarriers transmitted by the other base stations; and a mobile station in one of the plurality of cells, the mobile station configured to receive the cell-specific pilot subcarriers and the cell-specific data subcarriers corresponding to the cell, and the common pilot subcarriers and the common data subcarriers corresponding to the plurality of cells, and, wherein the mobile station is further configured to: determine cell-specific channel coefficients based on received signals on the cell-specific pilot subcarriers and apply the cell-specific channel coefficients to received signals on the cell-specific data subcarriers to compensate for cell-specific channel effects and to recover cell-specific information carried on the cell-specific data subcarriers, wherein the cell-specific channel corresponds to the channel from the base station in the cell to the mobile station; and determine composite channel coefficients based on received signals on the common pilot subcarriers and apply the composite channel coefficients to received signals on the common data subcarriers to compensate for composite channel effects and to recover common information carried on the common data subcarriers, wherein the composite channel corresponds to an aggregate of different channels from the plurality of base stations to the mobile station.