Disclosed is an apparatus and method for transmitting the synchronization signal in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based cellular system. The cell search process widely used in the OFDM based cellular system is divided into two steps for obtaining the frame timing synchronization and obtaining the cell-specific scrambling code. When designing the channel for obtaining the frame timing synchronization and the channel for obtaining the cell-specific scrambling code, different frequency reuse factors are applied to the synchronization channels of different steps according to the characteristics of each synchronization obtainment step in order to improve the performance of each step.