US Patent 9955458 Shared allocation of a downlink resource block

A one or more downlink resource elements of a downlink resource block in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system can be shared by two wireless communication devices (WCDs) by assigning each WCD a different one of two orthogonal modulation axes. To transmit data to two WCDs using the same downlink resource block, a base station may receive a data stream including respective data for each of the WCDs, then modulate the data for one WCD on in-phase modulation axis and modulate that data for the other WCD on the quadrature axis. The two modulation modes can be simultaneously transmitted on a common sub-carrier of an OFDM downlink to both WCDs. Each WCD can demodulate the data on a pre-assigned demodulation axis to recover its intended data. This sharing technique can be applied to some or all of the downlink resource elements of a commonly allocated downlink resource block.