Patent ID: 7492837

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving a beam signal at a receiver of a communications system; receiving an antenna signal at the receiver; and estimating parameters of the received beam signal based on information received in the received antenna signal, wherein estimating the parameters includes channel estimation, wherein the estimating of the parameters is further based on the received beam signal, and wherein the antenna signal includes a common pilot channel, and estimating the parameters is based on signals received in the common pilot channel, wherein the communication system is a cellular communication system and said cellular communication system comprising a plurality of cells, each cell comprising at least one sector, wherein the antenna signal is transmitted over an entire sector and the beam signal is transmitted over a part of a sector, wherein the channel is estimated as: ĥ joint ={circumflex over (β)}ĥ DL-DPCCH +(1−{circumflex over (β)}) ĥ P-CPICH wherein ĥ P-CPICH is a channel estimate obtained from the antenna signal and ĥ DL-DPCCH is a channel estimate obtained from the beam signal, and {circumflex over (β)} is a weight factor, and wherein the weight factor is calculated as: β ^ = ( 1 - ρ _ ) · SNR ^ h DL - DPCCH ( 1 - ρ _ ) · SNR ^ h DL - DPCCH + ρ _ ⁢ SNR ^ h P - CPICH , where ρ is the expectation value of the time variant correlation coefficient and S {circumflex over (N)} R is the estimate of the signal-to-noise-ratio of the signal.