Patent ID: 8331324

Claim:
A method for receiving data by a subscriber station in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) system comprising: a) receiving and downconverting a plurality of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols, said plurality of OFDM symbols comprising a first plurality of subcarriers, said first plurality of subcarriers being defined in a soft handoff zone comprising a first dimension of subchannels, said first dimension of subchannels comprising said first plurality of subcarriers; and a second dimension of divided and multiplexed OFDM symbols; said first plurality of subcarriers in said soft handoff zone having a subchannel definition; b) providing a Fourier Transform (FT) on each of said first plurality of subcarriers to generate a plurality of divided-multiplexed coded signals; and c) providing division-multiplexing decoding on the plurality of divided-multiplexed coded signals to recover data from a base station.