Patent ID: 7453946

Claim:
A communication node comprising: an angle-of-arrival estimator comprising circuitry configured to estimate an angle-of-arrival for a received orthogonal-frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) signal from a subcarrier level of at least one symbol received by at least two elements of a multi-element antenna, the received signal comprising a plurality of subcarriers modulated with the at least one symbol; and a channel coefficient generator comprising circuitry configured to generate channel coefficients from the estimated angle-of-arrival for processing subsequent symbols, wherein the angle-of-arrival estimator estimates the angle-of-arrival of the received signal using a plurality of pilot subcarriers spaced apart in a frequency spectrum of the received signal, wherein the circuitry of the angle-of-arrival estimator is further configured to: generate an initial matrix (X) comprising the demodulated pilot subcarriers; and perform a search function to identify a peak corresponding to the estimated angle-of-arrival, the search function being based on a decomposition of a response matrix (A), and wherein the response matrix (A), the initial matrix (X), and uncorrelated noise (N) are related based on the relation X=AD+N in which diagonal matrix (D) has elements comprising known pilot symbols.