Patent ID: 8537787

Claim:
A method for communications device operations, the method comprising: determining a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) response for each component carrier (CC) in a set of configured CCs, thereby producing a set of HARQ responses; generating an information vector from the set of HARQ responses, wherein a unique set of bits selected from the information vector is assigned to represent a HARQ response for each different CC in the set of configured CCs; encoding the information vector based on a (n, k) linear block code corresponding to the set of configured CCs, wherein the (n, k) linear block code is obtained by a linear transformation of an original (n, k) linear block code, where n is a length of code words, and k is a length of information vectors with k; and transmitting the encoded information vector, wherein a code word space generated by an expurgated (n, k′) linear block code has a larger minimum distance when a subset of the set of configured CCs are scheduled than when all CCs of the set of configured CCs are scheduled, regardless of which subset of the set of configured CCs are scheduled, where k′<k.