Patent ID: 8532051

Claim:
A method implemented in a base station for conveying scheduling information in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) multi-user (MU)-multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system, the method comprising: transmitting to a first user equipment (UE) the scheduling information including first scheduling information of the first UE and at least a portion of second scheduling information of at least one second UE, wherein the scheduling information includes at least one of a resource block (RB) assigned to the first UE, the number of streams, and an indication of one or more dedicated reference symbol (RS) layers assigned to the first UE, wherein the indication of one or more dedicated RS layers comprises an allocated pilot stream index (PSI), wherein at least part of the scheduling information is conveyed by a four-bit index that identifies the number of said streams and the PSI, wherein said four-bit index further identifies a modulation constellation assigned to the second UE in case the number of streams is 2, and wherein a part of the scheduling information is conveyed according to a table comprising: Modulation Four-bit Number of constellation of the index streams Allocated PSI second UE 0b0000 2 streams stream1 QPSK 0b0001 2 streams stream1 16QAM 0b0010 2 streams stream1 64QAM 0b0011 2 streams stream1 Unknown or not available 0b0100 2 streams stream2 QPSK 0b0101 2 streams stream2 16QAM 0b0110 2 streams stream2 64QAM 0b0111 2 streams stream2 Unknown or not available 0b1000 3 streams stream1 — 0b1001 3 streams stream2 — 0b1010 3 streams stream3 — 0b1011 4 streams stream1 — 0b1100 4 streams stream2 — 0b1101 4 streams stream3 — 0b1110 4 streams stream4 — 0b1111 Unknown or not Unknown or Unknown or available not available not available where QPSK stands for quadrature phase-shift keying and QAM stands for quadrature amplitude modulation.