Patent ID: 8432879

Claim:
A method of transmitting control channel symbols in an OFDM communication system downlink in each sub-frame, the OFDM communication system including one or more transmit antennae, the method including: (a) for each transmit antenna, mapping each of OFDM symbols of a control channel which are to be transmitted over the air to each of corresponding non-punctured logical resource elements of one virtual control resource block VCRB p,k ; (b) for each transmit antenna, mapping logical resource elements in each virtual control resource block VCRB p,k to physical resource elements in each of the first L OFDM symbols so that the physical resource elements are uniformly spaced over the entire transmission bandwidth; and (c) for each transmit antenna, transmitting the physical resource elements to user equipment, wherein the number of VCRB p,k is given by K L , p = ⌈ R · N B L , p ⌉ and wherein L is the number of OFDM symbols used for control channel transmission, 1≦L≦3, N is the number of physical resource blocks supported by bandwidth of the OFDM communication system, R is the number of sub-carriers in each physical resource block, p is the size index, and B L,p is the number of logical resource elements in a virtual control resource block with size index p to be mapped in each of the L OFDM symbols.