Another possibility is to signal the NB-PUSCH resource configuration semi-statically (e.g. via RRC signalling). For e.g., subcarriers 0-2 and 3-5 may be configured for 3-tone transmissions and subcarriers 6-11 may be configured for 6-tone transmission on a semi-static basis (Config 2 in FIG. 13). In this case, there are only three possible NB-PUSCH frequency resource allocations (two 3-tone allocations and one 6-tone allocation), which can be indicated using only two bits in the DCI.
In another embodiment, the NB-PUSCH resource allocation may use a nested structure. One example of the illustrated resource structure is shown in Table 3. In Table 3, for each NB-PUSCH resource configuration, BNB-PUSCH represents NB-PUSCH-Bandwidth, mNB-PUSCH,i is the number of tones in the resource unit, Ni is the number of resource units of mNB-PUSCH,i tones. For a given each NB-PUSCH resource configuration, summation of the
is the total number of schedule-able resource units. NB-PUSCH resource configuration 0 is illustrated in FIG. 15. NB-PUSCH resource configuration 1 is illustrated in FIG. 16. NB-PUSCH resource configuration can be configured by eNB, for example, via SIB.