Patent ID: 7907673

Claim:
A method of ascertaining a signal power of an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) signal, the method comprising: cellular communication equipment performing the following: ascertaining a plurality of channel estimates from the OFDM signal; estimating one or more compensating phase shift values for aligning the plurality of channel estimates with respect to phase; generating a plurality of phase corrected channel estimates by using the one or more compensating phase shift values to align the plurality of channel estimates with respect to phase; and coherently combining the phase corrected channel estimates, thereby ascertaining the signal power of the OFDM signal, wherein: estimating the one or more compensating phase shift values for aligning the plurality of reference symbols with respect to phase comprises: applying each of a plurality, K, of hypothesized sets of phase corrections to the plurality channel estimates to obtain K sets of hypothesized phase corrected channel estimates; and coherently combining the phase corrected channel estimates comprises: producing K hypotheses of the signal power of the OFDM signal by, for each of the K sets of hypothesized phase corrected channel estimates, coherently combining the hypothesized phase corrected channel estimates; and ascertaining the signal power of the OFDM signal by ascertaining which of the K hypotheses of the signal power of the OFDM signal is a maximum one of the K hypotheses of the signal power of the OFDM signal.