APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR USE IN THE MULTICAST OF TRAFFIC DATA IN WIRELESS MULTIPLE ACCESS COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS

摘要

In a wireless communications system, multicast messages are transported to groups of wireless terminals by employing a common control channel to transm it a multicast paging message indicating that multicast traffic data is to be transmitted to a particular group of wireless terminals. In an embodiment of the invention, t he essential information transmitted in the common control channel is the identifier of t he group of wireless terminals intended to receive the multicast traffic data and the location of a traffic channel on which the multicast traffic is to be transported in a channel resource which may include a representation of bandwidth and time interval. In accordance with an aspect of the invention, the common control channel is associated with a traffic channel in a prescribed fixed manner. Further, the traffic channel used for the purpose of multicast can be the same traffic channel used for the normal point-to- point transmission of traffic data.