Patent ID: 7978788

Claim:
A method of estimating a DC offset for a signal received in a radio receiver, wherein the received signal includes a digitally modulated signal component, a DC offset component, and a noise component, said digitally modulated signal component having a statistical distribution, said method comprising: estimating by a parameter estimator, at least one parameter of a postulate of the statistical distribution of the digitally modulated signal component; estimating by a DC offset estimator, the DC offset utilizing the at least one estimated parameter of the postulate of the statistical distribution of the digitally modulated signal component; determining by a stopping criteria checking unit, whether a predefined stopping criterion has been met; if the predefined stopping criterion has been met, subtracting the estimated DC offset from the received signal; if the predefined stopping criterion has not been met: estimating by a noise variation estimator, the standard deviation of the noise component; and repeating the steps of estimating the at least one parameter of the postulate of the statistical distribution of the digitally modulated signal component, and estimating the DC offset until the predefined stopping criterion is met; determining by a comparator, whether a ratio of a chosen one of the estimated parameter(s) to the estimated noise standard deviation is greater than a pre-defined threshold value; if the ratio is greater than the predefined threshold value, utilizing the estimated DC offset; and if the ratio is not greater than the predefined threshold value, calculating and utilizing an average value of the received signal over a received burst to estimate the DC offset.