Patent ID: 8401038

Claim:
A terminal to process a plurality of physical layer frames of a received wireless signal, the terminal comprising: a receiver module configured to receive a wireless signal comprising a plurality of physical layer frames; a physical layer frame synchronization module, communicatively coupled with the receiver module, and configured to identify one or more start of frame locations for the plurality of physical layer frames to achieve frame synchronization, wherein identifying a start of frame location is dependent only on a physical layer header associated with the start of frame location; a physical layer header decoder module, communicatively coupled with the physical layer frame synchronization module, and configured to decode a physical layer header associated with an identified start of frame location of a selected one of the plurality of physical layer frames according to a first decoding technique to identify signaling information attributable to a payload of the selected frame; an error identification module, communicatively coupled with the physical layer header decoder module, and configured to: decode the physical layer header according to a second decoding technique, wherein the physical layer header is divided into a plurality of sub-blocks and the second decoding technique decodes the sub-blocks of the physical layer header; compare results from the first decoding technique to results of the second decoding technique; and generate an error value associated with only the physical layer header and no other physical header when the compared results do not match; and an error accumulator module, communicatively coupled with the error identification module, and configured to: receive the generated error value; weight the generated error value in proportion to a degree of difference between the comparison of the results from the first decoding technique to results of the second decoding technique; and accumulate generated error values from one or more physical layer frames.