Patent ID: 8155701

Claim:
A base station of a radio access network comprising: a transceiver configured for communicating a frame of information over an air interface with a wireless terminal participating in a connection with the base station; a frame handler arranged to process the frame as plural subframes, each subframe comprising at least one downlink burst and at least one uplink burst, each burst of the frame being separated from a succeeding burst by a transition gap, the frame handler being arranged to process at least one of the downlink bursts of the frame and at least one of the uplink bursts of the frame according to a first type of multiple access technology and to process at least one other downlink burst of the frame and at least one other uplink burst of the frame according to a second type of multiple access technology, wherein the first type of multiple access technology is orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology and the second type of multiple access technology is single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) technology, wherein the frame comprises two subframes: a first burst of a first subframe being a downlink burst according to the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology and a second burst of the first subframe being an uplink burst according to the single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) technology; a first burst of a second subframe being a downlink burst according to the single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) technology and a second burst of the first subframe being an uplink burst according to the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology.