Patent ID: 8351387

Claim:
A method for receiving downlink acknowledgement/negative acknowledgement (ACK/NAK) signals in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of ACK/NAK signals and repetitions of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals that are mapped to one or more OFDM symbols; and confirming receipt of the ACK/NAK signals and the repetitions, wherein the one or more OFDM symbols are allocated for transmission of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals and the repetitions of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals within one sub-frame, wherein an entire frequency band of each of the one or more OFDM symbols is divided into a plurality of frequency regions, wherein the one or more OFDM symbols corresponding to each of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals and the repetitions of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals are determined according to an equation k=j mod N OS , and a frequency region for each of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals and repetitions of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals are determined according to an equation l=(i+j)mod N zone , and where k denotes an OFDM symbol index, j denotes a repetition index, N OS denotes a number of the one or more OFDM symbols allocated for transmission of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals and the repetitions of the plurality of ACK/NAK signals, l denotes a frequency region index, i denotes an ACK/NAK signal index, and N zone denotes a number of the plurality of frequency regions.