Patent ID: 8743910

Claim:
A method of filtering a received signal in a communications system, the method comprising: storing a received signal; providing just a portion of the stored received signal to a plurality of filter assessment branches, each filter assessment branch being arranged to filter the portion using a respective first filter configuration of a first set of filter configurations, wherein at least a first of the first plurality of filter assessment branches includes a single impulse response filter as a first filter configuration, and each of the remaining ones of the first plurality of filter assessment branches include a different first filter configuration; generating an initial channel impulse response (CIR) estimate using the first assessment branch; distributing the initial CIR estimate among remaining ones of the plurality of filter assessment branches; filtering the distributed CIR estimates using corresponding filter assessment branches to obtain filtered CIR estimates without the need for estimating the CIR from the received signal; generating filter quality assessment metrics from the initial CIR estimate and the filtered CIR estimates; selecting a second filter configuration from a second set of filter configurations in dependence upon the filter quality assessment metrics; and applying the received signal to a filter associated with the second filter configuration, wherein a number of filter configurations in the second set of filter configurations is less than or equal to a number of filter assessment branches.