Patent ID: 7876839

Claim:
A method performed by a receiver for processing a frame of orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) symbols comprising: determining initial correlation estimates for pilot and data subcarriers from an OFDM preamble symbol of the frame; low-pass filtering the initial correlation estimates to remove noise to generate refined correlation estimates; and performing a linear interpolation using the refined correlation estimates and pilot subcarrier estimates of a current OFDM data symbol to generate channel estimates for the current OFDM data symbol, wherein the initial correlation estimates comprise an initial cross-correlation estimate between pilot and data subcarriers and an autocorrelation estimate between the pilot subcarriers, wherein the low-pass filtering generates refined cross-correlation and autocorrelation estimates, wherein the linear interpolation is performed using the refined cross-correlation and autocorrelation estimates, wherein the linear interpolation is a Wiener interpolation that comprises: calculating an inverse autocorrelation estimate for the current OFDM data symbol based on a recursive process using an inverse autocorrelation estimate for one or more pilot subcarriers of a prior OFDM data symbol and the pilot subcarrier estimates of the current OFDM data symbol; and generating Wiener filter coefficients for the pilot subcarriers of the current OFDM data symbol from the refined cross-correlation estimate and the inverse autocorrelation estimate for the current OFDM data symbol.