Patent ID: 8248973

Claim:
A method of configuring Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) processes at a transmitting station to be used in a Time-Division Duplex (TDD) communication system having a receiving station, comprising: determining a feedback downlink time slot F i , wherein the feedback downlink time slot F i is a time slot at which the receiving station provides a HARQ feedback packet corresponding to a data packet transmitted by the transmitting station to the receiving station at an uplink time slot i using a HARQ process; determining a transmission time slot T i , wherein the transmission time slot T i is an uplink time slot at which an additional data transmission is transmitted by the transmitting station using the HARQ process; determining a number of uplink time slots N i between the uplink time slot i and a time slot immediately preceding transmission time slot T i , wherein the number of uplink time slots N i is determined by: N i = T i - i - b × ( ⌊ T i a + b ⌋ - ⌊ i a + b ⌋ ) ; wherein a is a number of time slots for uplink within a frame, and b is a number of time slots for downlink within a frame; and configuring a number of HARQ processes N to be a maximum value of the determined number of uplink time slots N i in a range of i from 1 to a, wherein a denotes a number of time slots for uplink within a frame.