The present invention provides a method of operating a base station transmitter. The method includes providing a cellular downlink synchronization signal having primary and secondary portions, wherein the primary portion employs a corresponding one of a plurality of different primary signals allocated to adjoining transmission cells. The method also includes further providing cell-specific information in the secondary portion and transmitting the cellular downlink synchronization signal. In one embodiment, the primary portion explicitly indicates a partial cell identification information and the remaining cell identification information is carried in the secondary portion. In another embodiment, the plurality of different primary signals are simply used to avoid the channel mismatch effect. The present invention also provides a method of operating user equipment. The method includes receiving a cellular downlink synchronization signal having primary and secondary portions wherein the timing acquisition is performed in conjunction with the primary synchronization sequence index detection via the primary portion. In addition, the secondary portion provides cell-specific parameters and identifying and extracting the secondary portion.