Patent ID: 8687607

Claim:
A method for sending feedback for a multicast/broadcast transmission comprising: decoding multicast/broadcast data received from a transmitter on a downlink resource; forming a feedback message based on quality of reception of the multicast/broadcast data if selected as a feedback reporting user terminal based on a statistical sample independent of the feedback message of a fraction of user terminals from among a class of user terminals receiving the multicast/broadcast data; queuing the feedback message for transmission to the transmitter on an uplink resource that corresponds to the downlink resource; wherein for unicast transmissions the uplink resource is dedicated to an uplink transmission corresponding to a downlink transmission on the downlink resource; wherein the feedback message is part of a statistically sampled feedback scheme, wherein a subset of the total number of receivers in communication with the transmitter is sampled; and wherein the sampled receivers belong to more than one category and the statistically sampled feedback scheme is based in part on the more than one category.