US Patent 9288021 Method and apparatus for uplink ACK/NACK resource allocation

A method is provided to allocate resources for wireless communications. The method includes grouping downlink control channels from multiple subframes and ordering the downlink control channels across downlink subframes having a first control channel element located in a first symbol map and associated with reserved resources for an uplink channel. The method employs a symbol first mapping or a mixed-symbol/subframe first mapping to efficiently allocate the resources.