Patent ID: 8229036

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: a front end module for receiving an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal from a communication channel, the OFDM signal including a plurality of pilot tones and a plurality of data tones; a slicer module for: processing the plurality of pilot tones thereby generating a plurality of pilot tone hard decisions and a plurality of pilot tone error terms; and processing the plurality of data tones thereby generating a plurality of data tone hard decisions and a plurality of data tone error terms; a qualifier module for identifying one of the plurality of data tone hard decisions as a pseudo-pilot tone hard decision when its corresponding error term is less than or equal to a predetermined threshold value; and a channel estimation module for processing the plurality of pilot tone hard decisions and the pseudo-pilot tone hard decision thereby generating a channel estimate of the communication channel; and wherein: based on the channel estimate of the communication channel, the slicer module implemented to re-process the plurality of data tones thereby generating at least one additional plurality of data tone hard decisions and at least one additional plurality of data tone error terms.