Patent ID: 7664091

Claim:
A method comprising the steps of: producing a plurality of control messages in an OFDM communication system that need to be transmitted to a plurality of remote units within a control channel shared among the plurality of remote units within a frame in the OFDM system, wherein the control channel comprises time and frequency partitions occupying a plurality of subcarriers on one or more OFDM bauds of the frame; determining a reliability level for each control message, the reliability level including a combination of a channel coding rate, modulation, and transmission power level; grouping control messages for the plurality of remote units having a similar reliability level to produce a plurality of grouped control messages; encoding each group wherein two of the groups are encoded with a different encoding scheme; and transmitting the encoded groups on the plurality of partitions of the control channel within the frame in the OFDM system wherein symbols from the partitions are interleaved to be distributed over the subcarriers for the control channel.