Patent ID: 7203461

Claim:
A method to determine a channel quality, as represented by a current bit error probability (BEP) for radio frequency (RF) bursts transmitted from a servicing base station to a wireless terminal in a cellular wireless communication system, the method comprising: receiving the RF bursts by the wireless terminal wherein the RF bursts are transmitted according to a transmission scheme; forming a data block from the RF bursts; decoding the data block; determining whether decoding of the data block was successful; determining a measured quality report for the data block; when decoding is unsuccessful: setting the current BEP to a weighted sum of the estimated quality report and a quality report threshold; and incrementing the quality report threshold by an increment step size until an upper quality report threshold limit is reached; when decoding is successful: setting the current BEP to the measured quality report; and decrementing the quality report threshold by a decrement step size until a lower quality report threshold limit is reached.