Patent ID: 7355958

Claim:
A method for blindly determining a channel impulse response for a channel in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communications system, said method comprising the steps of: providing at least first and second receive antennas which produce at least first and second OFDM received signals from a single OFDM signal transmitted over said channel; and processing said first received signal and said second received signal to determine said channel impulse response for said channel, thereby permitting recovery of said signal transmitted OFDM signal; wherein said step of processing includes the additional steps of: constructing a constructed matrix from said at least first and second received signals; performing a singular value decomposition on said constructed matrix to produce a left singular matrix and a right singular matrix; finding a right singular vector corresponding to a smallest singular value of said constructed matrix, thereby yielding said channel impulse response multiplied by an unknown scalar constant; and removing said unknown scalar constant, thereby yielding said channel impulse response and permitting recovery of the single transmitted OFDM signal by siad communications system, including information contained in said signal for use by said system.