Patent ID: 7433434

Claim:
A communication channel processing apparatus comprising: a plurality of antennas/downconverters, wherein each antenna/downconverter of the plurality of antennas/downconverters includes an antenna configured to receive an input communication signal, and a downconverter, coupled to the antenna, and configured to generate a digitized downconverted signal from the input communication signal, and to determine a receive vector for the antenna by performing successive interference cancellation based on the digitized downconverted signal, a transmitter symbol estimate, and an estimated time-frequency channel for the antenna; a plurality of receive channel transformers, coupled to the plurality of antennas/downconverters, wherein a first receive channel transformer of the plurality of receive channel transformers is configured to receive the digitized downconverted signal from each of the plurality of antennas/downconverters and to perform spatial filtering and demodulation to obtain a first data estimate for a first receive vector and to remodulate the first data estimate to obtain the transmitter symbol estimate, and a second receive channel transformer of the plurality of receive channel transformers is configured to receive the receive vector from each of the plurality of antennas/downconverters and to perform spatial filtering and demodulation to obtain a second data estimate for a second receive vector; and a channel tracker having a channel estimator and a linear predictor, and configured to produce the estimated time-frequency channel for each of the plurality of antennas/downconverters based on the transmitter symbol estimate from the first receive channel transformer and channel information of time frames prior to a channel to be estimated.