Patent ID: 8861623

Claim:
A method of allocating a plurality of processing delays in a wireless multi-carrier receiver, the method comprising: determining a channel dispersion for each of a plurality of carriers received by the multi-carrier receiver; determining a variable number of processing delays for each of the plurality of carriers based on the channel dispersions, wherein the variable number of processing delays comprise a finger bank comprising a variable number of RAKE fingers or a tap bank comprising a variable number of taps; processing each of the received carriers using the number of processing delays determined for the corresponding carrier; and wherein determining the variable number of processing delays for each of the plurality of carriers based on the channel dispersions comprises: allocating a minimum number of processing delays to each received carrier; identifying dispersive carriers by determining which carriers, if any, have a channel dispersion greater than or equal to a dispersion threshold; and determining a signal-to-interference ratio for each of the dispersive carriers; allocating one or more additional processing delays among the dispersive carriers by: comparing the signal-to-interference ratio determined for one dispersive carrier with the signal-to-interference ratio determined for another dispersive carrier to determine a comparison metric; and allocating the one or more additional processing delays to favor the dispersive carrier with the larger signal-to-interference ratio when the comparison metric meets a first criteria.