Patent ID: 8559887

Claim:
A method comprising: at a first wireless communication device, receiving, over a period of time, at a plurality of antennas transmissions in a channel from a second wireless communication device to produce a corresponding plurality of antenna-specific receive signals; computing from the plurality of antenna-specific receive signals a plurality of channel estimates for a channel between the first wireless communication device and the second wireless communication device; computing a channel observation parameter from each of the plurality of channel estimates, wherein the channel observation parameters represent conditions of the channel between the first wireless communication device and the second wireless communication device at a time instance; storing the channel observation parameters computed for each of the plurality of channel estimates at the first wireless communication device; determining combinations of the channel observation parameters; for each determined combination of channel observation parameters, computing data representing differences between the channel observation parameters in the respective combination; storing the data representing the differences in bins that each correspond to a range of time intervals, wherein the data representing the differences are each stored in a bin corresponding to a range of time intervals that encompasses the time interval between time of reception of the transmissions corresponding to the channel observations parameters used to compute the respective differences; and generating an estimate of the coherence time of the channel based on a distribution of the data representing the differences stored in the bins.