Patent ID: 8149961

Claim:
A method for communications, the method comprising: receiving a plurality of sub-band signals of a multi-band signal, wherein each of the plurality of sub-band signals has a corresponding base-band, each of the corresponding base-bands comprising a same base-band signal, and each of the same base-band signals are received at different tie intervals in each sub-band; passing the plurality of sub-band signals through a plurality of matched filters to produce a plurality of filter outputs; sampling the outputs of the plurality of matched filters to generate a plurality of sampled filter outputs; aligning the plurality of sampled filter outputs into a matrix Y wherein matrix Y is aligned such that Y(m,n)=y m (n/w s ) where y m comprises a sub-band signal output of index m of a matched filter, n is a time index, and w s comprises a sampling rate; applying an inverse FFT along sub-band indexes of matrix Y to produce a matrix Z; and estimating a signal delay by determining a maximum of the plurality of sampled filter outputs in matrix Z after application of the inverse FFT.