CONTROL CHANNEL DESIGN FOR LOW BANDWIDTH USERS

摘要

A hopping pattern is defined by L frequency hops among N candidate resources. L is determined from at least a total number M of frequency selective candidate resources. N is the number of candidate resources that are used for the frequency hopping. Control signaling such as an E-PDCCH is sent by a network to a UE according to this hopping pattern to achieve frequency diversity. In the examples the candidate resources are physical resource blocks PRBs. In one embodiment L=K when N=1 and L=1 otherwise (K is predefined by the network); in another embodiment L =IM /Nl. In the examples the E-PDCCH occupies different OFDM symbols in different candidate PRBs in each of the L frequency hops. Confining the hopping pattern to a maximum bandwidth of 1.4 MHz enables low cost machine type communication devices to obtain an E-PDCCH that gives their resource allocation.