Patent ID: 7948944

Claim:
A method of communication between base stations and mobile devices in a multi-carrier packet communication system that utilizes a time-frequency resource and covers a plurality of geographic cells, the method comprising: allocating a zone in the time-frequency resource, wherein: the zone is designated for a type of application and is capable of carrying two or more packet streams associated with the type of application, each of the two or more packet streams associated with the type of application utilizing one of a plurality of modulation and coding schemes, the plurality of modulation and coding schemes utilizing a basic time-frequency resource unit and integer multiples of the basic time-frequency resource unit; and the portion of the time-frequency resource falling outside of the zone is capable of carrying two or more packet streams not associated with the type of application; for at least some of the two or more packet streams within the zone, creating a control message associated with each packet stream wherein the control message is used in part to ensure proper communication of the packet stream; aggregating the created control messages associated with each packet stream in accordance with a common characteristic of the packet streams; and transmitting the control messages in a group.