Patent ID: 7835262

Claim:
A method for receiving a preamble in a wireless network, the wireless network comprising one or more simultaneously operating pico networks having a piconet coordinator and at least one enhanced communication device and at least one legacy device, the method comprising: receiving a current preamble that is used for channel estimation, wherein the current preamble is used for the estimation of channels present in both enhanced and legacy time-interleaved, multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexed communications systems having an available bandwidth partitioned into a plurality of transmission bands and wherein the current preamble has been assigned to one or more of the pico networks and is decoded by the at least one legacy device; receiving a header to contain physical layer parameters and media access control layer information; and receiving a channel estimation extension used for channel estimation, wherein channels estimated by the channel estimation extension are only present in the enhanced time-frequency interleaved, multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexed communications system having the at least one enhanced communication device, wherein the at least one legacy device implements a three transmission band channel mode and can decode the current preamble and the header and will be able to set up a network allocation vector (NAV) and wherein the header signals use of the channel estimation extension allowing a receiver to be aware of which mode a transmitter will be using.