A base station, which includes a processor and a transmitter, communicates a reference signal to wireless communication devices in a wireless communication system. The processor encodes the reference signal into a first set of transmission resources, encodes other information into a second set of transmission resources, and multiplexes the two sets of transmission resources into a subframe, such that the first set of transmission resources is multiplexed into at least a portion of a first set of orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) symbols based on an identifier associated with the base station and the second set of transmission resources is multiplexed into a second set of OFDM symbols. The transmitter transmits the subframe to the wireless devices. According to one embodiment, transmission resources for carrying the reference signal may be allocated according to a predetermined allocation, a semi-static allocation, a dynamic allocation, and/or an allocation based on higher layer signaling.