Layer 1 / Layer 2 Control Channel Structure in Single-Carrier FDMA Based Evolved UTRA Uplink

Single-Carrier (SC)-FDMA based radio access in the evolved UTRA uplink that is necessary for downlink scheduling, link adaptation, hybrid ARQ (automatic repeat request) with soft-combining, and for uplink feedback control signaling. We propose SC-based multiplexing of L1/L2 control signaling with a shared data channel for a set of user equipment (UE) that transmits both an uplink shared data channel and L1/L2 control channel within the same sub-frame. We also propose an L1/L2 control signaling multiplexing scheme without uplink data transmission that takes advantage of frequency hopping using multiple exclusively-assigned time-frequency resources to achieve the frequency diversity effect. Computer simulation results show that the proposed SC-based multiplexing of the L1/L2 control channel with the shared data channel achieves a higher user throughput than multicarrier-based multiplexing. The results also show that the proposed L1/L2 control signaling multiplexing scheme for the UE without uplink data transmission achieves both high quality reception through large frequency diversity and an increase in coverage through full use of the transmission time duration compared to the conventional schemes.