Patent ID: 8228862

Claim:
For use in a wireless network comprising a plurality of base stations for communicating with subscriber stations using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), wherein a first base station comprises: a downlink transmit path comprising circuitry configured to transmit a plurality of dedicated reference (DR) signals in even-numbered time slots and odd-numbered time slots, each of the even-numbered and odd-numbered time slots comprising S OFDM symbols, each of the S OFDM symbols comprising N subcarriers, and each subcarrier of each OFDM symbol comprises a resource element, and wherein resource elements in an even-numbered time slot and a contiguous odd-numbered time slot are assigned to a first resource block comprising a first set of contiguous subcarriers of the S OFDM symbols in the even-numbered time slot and the contiguous odd-numbered time slot and to a second resource block comprising a second set of contiguous subcarriers of the S OFDM symbols in the even-numbered time slot and the contiguous odd-numbered time slot; and a reference signal allocator configured to allocate the plurality of DR signals to selected resource elements, wherein: in the even-numbered time slot in the first resource block, a first group of DR signals are: i) allocated to a first group of adjacent resource elements; and ii) allocated to a second group of adjacent resource elements; in the contiguous odd-numbered time slot in the first resource block, the first group of DR signals are allocated to a third group of adjacent resource elements; in the even-numbered time slot in the second resource block, the first group of adjacent DR signals are allocated to a fourth group of resource elements; and in the contiguous odd-numbered time slot in the second resource block, the first group of DR signals are: i) allocated to a fifth group of adjacent resource elements; and ii) allocated to a sixth group of adjacent resource elements.