Tone mapping signaling in a preamble

A system, comprising:

• a memory;
• and
• at least one processor coupled to the memory and configured to:
• receive a preamble of a frame corresponding to a wireless communications protocol, wherein the preamble comprises a tone mapping field;
• extract a unique value from the tone mapping field, wherein a bit size of the tone mapping field is based at least in part on a plurality of potential resource block mappings for a portion of a tone space corresponding to the wireless communications protocol;
• and
• determine a particular resource block mapping among the plurality of potential resource block mappings for the portion of the tone space based at least in part on the unique value, wherein the particular resource block mapping defines a different number of resource blocks allocated to the portion of the tone space than another resource block mapping in the plurality of potential resource block mappings.

A tangible computer-readable device having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by at least one computing device, cause the at least one computing device to perform operations comprising:

• receiving a preamble of a frame corresponding to a wireless communications protocol, wherein the preamble comprises a tone mapping field;
• extracting a unique value from the tone mapping field, wherein a bit size of the tone mapping field is based at least in part on a plurality of potential resource block mappings for a portion of a tone space corresponding to the wireless communications protocol;
• determining a particular resource block mapping among the plurality of potential resource block mappings for the portion of the tone space based at least in part on the unique value, wherein the particular resource block mapping defines a different number of resource blocks allocated to the portion of the tone space than another resource block mapping in the plurality of potential resource block mappings;
• mapping, by the least one processor, a plurality of tones to a resource block in the portion of the tone space based at least in part on the particular resource block mapping;
• and
• assigning the resource block to a receiver device based at least in part on the frame corresponding to the wireless communications protocol.