A method and an apparatus are provided for scrambling sequence initialization for downlink demodulation reference signal (DL DMRS) applied to the multi-user (MU) multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) in a coordinated multiple point (CoMP) scenario. The value of virtual slot index in the sequence initialization of the DL DMRS can be dynamically selected from two candidates and tied to the virtual cell ID and/or the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) scrambling ID. The two candidate values can be configured by a user equipment (UE) specific semi-statistical higher layer signaling if a subframe shifting is considered for enhanced inter-cell interference cancellation (eICIC) in HeNets. Possible values of virtual slot index used for generating the DL DMRS sequence initialization of the cell can then be derived so that access procedure information, which may include synchronization signal, physical broadcast channel, paging message, can be reliably received at the remote radio header (RRH) or pico cell.