Patent ID: 8085873

Claim:
A method of optimized channel estimation in a communication system, the method comprising: selecting a selected channel from among one or more multiple data stream channels in the communication system, said one or more multiple data stream channels each comprising a plurality of data streams; determining, for the selected channel, an initial channel estimate; transforming the initial channel estimate into an initial time domain impulse response estimate comprising a sequence of samples; selecting a sub-sequence of samples from the sequence of samples based on a maximum energy of the initial time domain impulse response estimate; generating a truncated time domain impulse response estimate by setting to zero the samples in the initial time domain impulse response estimate that are not in the selected sub-sequence of samples; computing a time domain weighted impulse response estimate using the truncated time domain impulse response estimate for the selected channel; and computing a maximum likelihood channel estimate for the selected channel by transforming the time domain weighted impulse response estimate into the frequency domain.