As used herein, the terms “user equipment” and “UE” in some cases might refer to mobile devices such as mobile telephones, personal digital assistants, handheld or laptop computers, and similar devices that have telecommunications capabilities. A UE might include a device and its associated removable memory module, such as but not limited to a Universal Integrated Circuit Card (hereinafter, UICC) that includes a Subscriber Identity Module (hereinafter, SIM) application, a Universal Subscriber Identity Module (hereinafter, USIM) application, or a Removable User Identity Module (hereinafter, R-UIM) application. Alternately, such a UE might include the device itself without such a module. In other cases, the term “UE” might refer to devices that have similar capabilities but that are not transportable, such as desktop computers, set-top boxes, or network appliances. The term “UE” could also refer to any hardware or software component that could terminate a communication session for a user.
Mobile communications has become an everyday commodity. In a communication system, radio resources are shared by a plurality of control channels and a number of data channels between base stations and user equipment. A base station identifies UEs through control channels and transmits data to the UEs via data channels. When the number of UEs connected to the base stations is relatively low, system resources are sufficient for control channels and data channels of all connected UEs. However, number of UEs connected to the base station varies a lot in different environments.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram illustrating a scenario of machine type communications. The numerous UEs 11 access and share the system resources simultaneously. For the machine type communication, the demands for higher control channel capacity and data channel capacity dramatically increase. Therefore, how to multiplex the control channels and the data channels corresponding to UEs 11 wherein the improvement of flexibility and efficiency of the resource utilization is a worth research issue.