Patent ID: 7826515

Claim:
A method of detecting multipath components in a time-varying fading radio channel in a digital wireless communications system, comprising: receiving individual multipath components of a signal transmitted through the channel with individual delays (τ i ) within a range (τ 1 . . . τ M ) of possible delay values, where for each individual delay (τ i ), i is an element of [1, M], with [1, M] being the full possible delay range; estimating the individual delays; calculating a delay profile (g(τ i )) repetitively and including during such calculation, an artificial multipath component (g″ 7 ) in the at least one previous delay profile at a delay value (τ 7 ) on which a multipath component from an earlier delay profile is significantly decreased in the at least one previous delay; searching repetitively for new multipath components in a search window constituting a subset of the range of possible delays; positioning the search window based on at least one previous delay profile (g (τ i )); determining for each of a number of different search window positions (k), a sum of power (P k ) for those multipath components of the at least one previous delay profile that are located in the search window with that position; and selecting the position of the search window, in which the search for new multipath components is performed, based on the determined sums of power (P k ).