Patent ID: 8797979

Claim:
A method of a user equipment for transmitting an ACK/NACK (Acknowledgement/Negative-ACK) signal in a wireless communication system, the method comprising: mapping, by the user equipment, some of multiple ACK/NACK signals to reference signal area selection information; based upon the mapped reference signal area selection information, selecting, by the user equipment, one or more reference signal areas among multiple control channel resources, the multiple control channel resources being located in a same physical resource block; allocating, by the user equipment, a message area of each of the multiple control channel resources to remaining ACK/NACK signals; and transmitting, by the user equipment, ACK/NACK signals to a base station by using the one or more selected reference signal areas and the allocated message area of each of the multiple control channel resources, wherein, when a number of reference signal areas included in the multiple control channel resources is equal to N, and when a number of the selected reference signal areas is equal to K, a size of the some of the ACK/NACK signals corresponds to a number of bits smaller than log 2 { N C K } bits or equal to log 2 { N C K } bits, wherein the number of bits is an integer.