Patent ID: 7499515

Claim:
A communications system, comprising: a transmitter that transmits a modulated signal having encoded communications data over a communications channel, and comprising link resource allocator that adjusts one of at least modulation and coding at the transmitter based on received channel state information of the transmitted signal; a receiver that receives the transmitted signal, and comprising a demodulator that determines received signal metrics from the modulated signal; a noise power estimator that estimates the noise power of the received communications signal by collecting N data samples from the communications signals, forming a covariance matrix of the N data samples based on a model order estimate, computing the eigenvalue decomposition of the covariance matrix and ranking resultant eigenvalues from the minimum to the maximum for determining the noise power of the received signal; and a link quality generator that determines the link quality of the communications channel and generates channel state information based on the estimated noise power and received signal metrics and transmits the channel state information to said link resource allocator within said transmitter, wherein at least one of modulation and coding are adjusted based on monitored link quality of the communications channel to enhance use of the available channel capacity.