Patent ID: 7876844

Claim:
A method for determining positions of pilot sub-carriers in a received OFDM symbol, the method comprising: extracting components of pilot sub-carriers from a theoretical OFDM symbol to form M theoretical pilot sequences P m ,m=1˜M according to M possible distributions in frequency domain of pilot sub-carriers in the theoretical OFDM symbol; extracting components of pilot sub-carriers from the received OFDM symbol to form K hypothetical pilot sequences R k ,k=1˜K according to K possible distributions in frequency domain of pilot sub-carriers in the received OFDM symbol; calculating correlation between every two adjacent elements of the theoretical pilot sequences P m to get M corresponding theoretical correlation sequences CP m ; calculating correlation between every two adjacent elements of the hypothetical pilot sequence R k to get K corresponding hypothetical correlation sequences CR k ; calculating sequence correlations V m,k between one of the hypothetical correlation sequences CR k and corresponding one of the theoretical correlation sequences CP m according to equation V m,k =sum(CR k ·CP m *); and selecting one from all sequence correlations V m,k which has maximum modulus value, wherein the hypothetical pilot sequence corresponding to the selected sequence correlation is determined to be identical with the theoretical pilot sequence corresponding to the selected sequence correlation, thereby the positions of pilot sub-carriers in the received OFDM symbol can be determined.