A method and apparatus for generating a reference signal sequence for performing channel estimation. In one embodiment, the method includes: determining an initialization value; limiting the initialization value to be less than a predetermined positive integer M to provide a limited initialization value; mapping the limited initialization value into an initialization sequence having a predetermined number L of sequence values; providing the initialization sequence to a pseudo-random number generator to generate a pseudo-random number sequence; and generating the RS sequence based on the PRNS.