The present invention provides a 
preamble that is inserted into an OFDMA frame and has a common sequence for all the base stations participating in a transmission. The subscriber 
station performs fine synchronization using the common sequence on the common 
preamble, and the resulting peaks will provide the locations of candidate base stations. The 
base station specific search is then performed in the vicinities of those peaks by using 
base station specific pseudo-
noise sequences. With this two stage 
cell search, the searching window is drastically reduced. The 
preamble is matched to known values by a respective 
receiver to decode the signals and permit multiple signals to be transferred from the 
transmitter to the 
receiver. The preamble may comprise two parts, 
Preamble-1 and 
Preamble-2, which may be used in different systems, including multioutput, multi-input (
MIMO) systems.