A wireless communication network includes a plurality of base stations capable of wireless communication with a plurality of subscriber stations within a coverage area of the network. At least one of the plurality of base stations is capable of selecting up to four orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) symbols in a subframe of a physical uplink shared channel. The up to four OFDM symbols are selected starting from the bottom a resource grid of the physical uplink shared channel in a bottom-up manner, and one or more rank information (RI) coded bits are repeated in each of the selected up to four OFDM symbols.