APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR AUTOMATIC REPEAT REQUEST WITH REDUCED RESOURCE ALLOCATION OVERHEAD IN A WIRELESS VOIP COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

摘要

A base station (103) assigns a set of mobile stations (101) to a group wherein the group will share a set of radio resources (770). A shared control channel information element (501) is sent to the group of mobile stations (101) and provides a bitmap having fields for group ordering (511), resource allocations (530), continuation resources (540) for HARQ, and an ordering pattern (513). If a mobile station requires retransmission it will access the resources indicated by the continuation resources field (540) in order to receive data. The HARQ blocks may be assigned to a mobile station based upon an index (601) which may correspond to the mobile station vocoder rate. Further, HARQ subgroups may be defined to associate subgroups of mobile stations with specific HARQ transmission opportunities on the super-frame and allocated by a rotating bitmap.