Patent ID: 7801180

Claim:
A wireless communication system, comprising: a plurality of base stations to provide wireless communications to mobile stations in respective cells associated with the base stations; and one or more processors that use a cell identification sequence as a leading symbol of and as at least part of a preamble of every downlink subframe in time of a downlink signal from a base station to a mobile station, wherein the cell identification sequence is one of a set of cell identification sequences and is designated to identify a base station and a cell sector of the base station, wherein at least one data symbol is included, at a position subsequent to the cell identification sequence in time, in every downlink subframe of the downlink signal, and, in every other L frames of the downlink signal, at a position subsequent to the cell identification sequence in time, a symbol is included to comprise a plurality of copies of a sequence placed sequentially in time, wherein L is an integer greater than 0 and the sequence is common to at least a portion of base stations with which the mobile station communicates.