Patent ID: 8693430

Claim:
A method of communication for a mobile device served by a base station in a packet communication system that utilizes a time-frequency resource, the method comprising: receiving a control message among a plurality of control messages transmitted from the serving base station, wherein the plurality of control messages are associated with a class of packets and aggregated together in a control message format in accordance with a common characteristic of the class of packets; and transmitting to the serving base station a packet of the class over a zone in accordance with the control message, wherein: the zone is designated for carrying packets of the class and is comprised of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols in the time domain and frequency subcarriers in the frequency domain within the time-frequency resource, and the portion of the time-frequency resource falling outside of the zone is designated for carrying packets other than the class of packets within the zone; and the packet is transmitted with one of a plurality of modulation and coding schemes, the plurality of modulation and coding schemes utilizing a basic time-frequency resource unit and integer multiples of the basic time-frequency resource unit.