Patent ID: 7983151

Claim:
An uplink transmission method for use in a multi-hop communication system, the system comprising a source apparatus, a destination apparatus and one or more intermediate apparatuses, and the system providing two or more different communication paths extending between said source apparatus and said destination apparatus, said source apparatus being configured to transmit information indirectly to the destination apparatus along a series of links forming a first such communication path via one or more of said intermediate apparatuses and also being configured to transmit information to said destination apparatus along one link or a series of links forming a second such communication path; and the intermediate apparatus or each said intermediate apparatus being configured to receive information from a previous apparatus along a path and to transmit the received information to a subsequent apparatus along a path; the method comprising transmitting particular information from the source apparatus along the first communication path via one or more of said intermediate apparatuses to the destination apparatus; transmitting the same particular information from the source apparatus along the second communication path to the destination apparatus; and combining the same particular information transmitted along the first and second communication paths in the destination apparatus; wherein, before said particular information is transmitted, it is encoded with Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) packet encoding, wherein the transmissions of the same information along both or all of the communication paths, as the case may be, are treated as transmission and re-transmission(s) according to HARQ.