Method and apparatus for sending and receiving control channel in wireless communication system

Abstract

In a wireless communication system, a control channel is required in order to use limited resources effectively. However, the control channel resource is part of the system overhead, and thus reduces the data channel resource used for data transmission. In the long term evolution (LTE) system based on OFDM, one sub frame the consists of fourteen OFDM symbols wherein a maximum of three OFDM symbols are used for the control channel resource and remaining eleven OFDM symbols are used for the data channel resource. Therefore, the quantity of energy that can be transmitted for the control channel resource is extremely limited compared to the data channel resource. For this reason, the coverage of the control channel becomes less than that of the data channel, and even if a user can successfully receive the data channel, reception failure of a control channel sometimes results in failure of data recovery. In the present invention, in order to expand the coverage of the control channel to at least the coverage of the data channel, the time resource of the transmission resource wherein the control channel is transmitted is expanded and allocated for sending and receiving the control channel. By way of methods for extending the time resource are provided a method wherein a plurality of sub frames are used to transmit one control channel, and a method wherein a part of a data channel is used for the control channel.