Patent ID: 7308286

Claim:
A wireless communication receiver comprising: an antenna structure arranged to acquire dimensionally differentiated signals; a joint searcher and channel estimator arranged to essentially concurrently consider the dimensionally differentiated plural signals provided by the antenna structure for determining both a time of arrival and channel coefficient; wherein the joint searcher and channel estimator comprises: an antenna signal matrix in which complex values indicative of the dimensionally differentiated signal received in a sampling window are stored as a function of a sampling window time index and a dimensional differentiation index; a correlator arranged to locate value(s) in the antenna signal matrix for use in determining the time of arrival and the channel coefficient and to generate a correlator output; a correlator output analyzer arranged to use the value(s) located by the correlator to generate the time of arrival and the channel coefficient; wherein in locating the values the correlator output analyzer considers a dimensional reception vector formed from the antenna signal matrix with respect to a sampling window time index, the dimensional receptivity vector having a frequency related to a difference between phase components of complex values of the dimensional receptivity vector, there being plural possible frequencies for the dimensional receptivity, the plural possible frequencies being represented by a frequency index; and wherein for each combination of plural possible frequencies and plural time indexes, the correlator is arranged to calculate: Y(n,t) =FFT(n,X(:,t)) wherein t is the sampling window time index; X(:,t) is the complex antenna matrix, with : representing all antenna indexes for one sampling window time index; n is the frequency index.