Provided are a cell search method, a frame transmission method thereof, and a forward link frame structure thereof. The cell search method used by a terminal to search a target cell using reception signals received from a plurality of base stations, each base station transmitting a frame of its cell, in an Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) cellular system comprising a plurality cells to which a cell-specific scrambling code is assigned includes: detecting a hopping pattern of the target cell using reception sync channel symbols, which are signals corresponding to sync channel symbol positions of the reception signals, wherein the frame of each cell comprises M sync channel symbols code-hopped according to a hopping pattern of the cell, where M is a natural number equal to or greater than 2, each hopping pattern containing M sync channel code sequences and respectively corresponding to each code group to which a scrambling code of each cell belongs, and an arbitrary hopping pattern used in the OFDM cellular system differs from a cyclically shifted result of the hopping pattern, other hopping patterns, or cyclically shifted results of the other hopping patterns; and detecting a code group of the target cell based on the detected hopping pattern. Accordingly, a cell search time and the complexity of the cell search can be reduced.