In one exemplary embodiment of the invention, a method includes: receiving, by a mobile device, an indication of a base sequence and an indication of a cyclic shift from a base station; and obtaining, by the mobile device, a mobile device-specific demodulation reference signal sequence by calculating a mobile-device specific sequence and selecting a portion of the calculated mobile-device specific sequence to use as the mobile device-specific demodulation reference signal sequence, where calculating the mobile-device specific sequence includes applying the cyclic shift indicated by the received indication of a cyclic shift to the base sequence indicated by the received indication of a base sequence, where the selected portion of the calculated mobile-device specific sequence corresponds to a mobile-device specific physical resource block allocation.