Patent ID: 7822104

Claim:
A method of detecting multipath components in a time-varying fading radio channel in a digital wireless communications system, comprising: receiving individual multipath components of a signal transmitted through the channel with individual delays (T a , T b , T c ) within a range of possible delay values; calculating repetitively, an instantaneous delay profile indicating an instantaneous magnitude (g/(T)) for each of a number of individual delay values (T); generating an averaged delay profile from a number of repetitively calculated instantaneous delay profiles, the averaged delay profile indicating an averaged magnitude for the number of individual delay values, wherein the averaged delay profile is limited to delay values in a subset (W 1 , W 2 , W 3 ) of the range of possible delay values and further wherein the generation of the averaged delay profile is limited to delay values situated in regions (W 1 , W 2 , W 3 ) around currently estimated multipath components and the limited averaged delay profile is generated repetitively at a first rate, and a search for new multipath components is performed repetitively at a rate lower than the first rate; estimating from the averaged delay profile the delay of each individual multipath component; and using at least some of the estimated delays for RAKE combining.