Patent ID: 7230911

Claim:
A method of channel estimation within a communication system implementing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), comprising: receiving an OFDM symbol from a communication channel, said OFDM symbol having a plurality of data subcarriers and a plurality of pilot symbols; identifying subcarriers of interest, wherein the subcarriers of interest are a subset of the plurality of data subcarriers and are assigned to a user terminal; generating a pilot vector using a subset of pilot symbols from said OFDM symbol; obtaining a first interpolation vector corresponding to a first subcarrier of interest, the first interpolation vector selected from a plurality of stored interpolation vectors corresponding to each subcarrier of interest assigned to the user terminal; calculating a dot product of said pilot vector and said first interpolation vector to generate an equalization coefficient for said first subcarrier of interest; and equalizing at least one subcarrier using the equalization coefficient to reduce or remove undesirable channel effects from the OFDM symbol.