Patent ID: 8407549

Claim:
A method of operating synchronous Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) between a transmitting station and a receiving station in a Time-Division Duplex (TDD) communication system, comprising: configuring, at the transmitting station, a plurality of HARQ processes; transmitting, via one of the plurality of HARQ processes and using a frame structure including a plurality of regions of subframes, a data burst in a first subframe to the receiving station; receiving a second subframe transmitted from the receiving station and containing a HARQ feedback indicative of whether the data burst was correctly received at the receiving station; determining whether the HARQ feedback is an acknowledgement (ACK) or a negative acknowledgement (NACK); and retransmitting, via the one of the plurality of HARQ processes, the data burst in a third subframe to the receiving station if it is determined that the HARQ feedback is a NACK, wherein a total number of the plurality of HARQ processes is determined based on a total number of uplink subframes between the first subframe and the third subframe; and wherein a time period between transmitting the first subframe by the transmitting station and transmitting the second subframe by the receiving station is determined by a processing delay of the receiving station, an A-MAP configuration, and the frame structure.