Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate guard bandwidth independent mapping and de-mapping of bandwidth in a wireless communication system. Broadcast signals can be created as if all bandwidth were available, and guard bandwidth can be initialized over the utilized bandwidth such to puncture the data existing in the guard bandwidth. Upon decoding the broadcast signal, size of the guard bandwidth can be predetermined or estimated allowing a center portion of the signal to be decoded without decoding the guard bandwidth. In this regard, the decoder of the signal need not find exact positions of the guard bandwidth as transforming and decoding the center portion can provide a substantial portion of the signal to interpret the signal.