Patent ID: 8718275

Claim:
A delay estimator for estimating a delay of a received signal between a reference point and a reception point, the delay estimator comprising: a delay assessment device configured to: receive quantized reference-point values and quantized reception-point values, wherein each combination pair of quantized reference-point values and quantized reception-point values is associated with a quantized state, associate a predetermined significance value with each combination pair of quantized reference-point values and quantized reception-point values based on the quantized state of that combination pair, compute an average weighted significance value for each candidate delay in a set of candidate delays by weighting said predetermined significance values associated with each combination pair and averaging said weighted significance values, wherein each of said combination pairs is represented by a quantized reference-point value evaluated at a first time instant and a quantized reception-point value evaluated at a second time instant, and wherein the first time instant and the second time instant are time shifted by the candidate delay, and select an estimated delay time from the set of candidate delays based on the computed average weighted significance values, wherein said delay assessment device provides a first estimated delay time at a first time instance and a second estimated delay time at a second time instance, said second time instance occurring at a time after said first time instance, and the estimated delay time selected from the set of candidate delays based on the computed average weighted significance values corresponds to said first estimated delay time; and a delay estimator selector configured to: select one of the first estimated delay time and the second estimated delay time provided by the delay assessment device as a final estimated delay time based on a comparison between a quality metric computed for the first estimated delay time and the quality metric computed for the second estimated delay time.