Patent ID: 7197288

Claim:
In a cellular base station of the type that radiates in a number of directions so as to provide a number of sectors each having a respective air interface through which a mobile station in a given sector communicates with the base station, a method comprising: in all of the number of sectors, the base station receiving mobile station signals that have been encoded with a common spreading sequence; assigning to each sector of the number of sectors a respective time delay, such that any adjacent sectors of the number of sectors have different respective time delays than each other, the respective time delay being within a time window such that the mobile station would recognize a received signal encoded with the common spreading sequence offset by any of the respective time delays to be equivalently encoded signals; and in each sector of the number of sectors, the base station (i) encoding a respective signal with the common spreading sequence offset by the sector's respective time delay, so as to provide an encoded signal for the sector and (ii) sending the encoded signal into the sector's respective air interface for receipt by a mobile station operating in the sector.