Patent ID: 7672220

Claim:
An apparatus for combining of M high data rate wideband packetized OFDM wireless communication signals (M signals) to form a combined output signal, wherein at least M receive antennas each receive one of the M signals, wherein each of the M signals includes N frequency bins, and wherein M is an integer greater than or equal to 2 and N is a positive integer, the apparatus comprising: a joint timing recovery unit that performs joint coarse signal timing estimation and joint frequency offset estimation on digital data corresponding to each of the M signals; M Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) units that each convert the digital data for one of the M signals into frequency domain information in the form of sub-carrier data for each of N frequency bins for that one M signal and that output the frequency domain information for each of the M signals; and a combiner including: a channel estimation unit for receiving the frequency domain information of the M FFT units and generating channel estimates; a weight calculator for using the channel estimates and M gains to generate M weights, the M gains being analog gain adjustments associated with M receive chains; M weight blocks for multiplying the M weights and the frequency domain information of the M FFT units to generate M products; and a summer for adding the M products to generate the combined output signal.