Patent ID: 7613242

Claim:
An apparatus for use in a base station in a multicarrier wireless communication system, said apparatus comprising: a scheduler to determine bandwidth profiles of multicarrier subscriber stations associated with the base station and to generate an updated multicarrier frame structure for use by the base station to communicate with said multicarrier subscriber stations based on said bandwidth profiles, said bandwidth profiles being indicative of operating bandwidths of corresponding multicarrier subscriber stations, said updated multicarrier frame structure to include a plurality of time slots that each have a predetermined number of subcarriers distributed across a full channel bandwidth, wherein each multicarrier subscriber station can be one of: a full channel subscriber station and a subchannel subscriber station; wherein said scheduler is to determine a number of full-channel downlink data time slots, a number of sub-channel downlink data time slots, a number of full-channel uplink data time slots, and a number of sub-channel uplink data time slots to include in said updated multicarrier frame structure based on one or more factors, said one or more factors including said bandwidth profiles of said multicarrier subscriber stations associated with the base station.