Patent ID: 8917585

Claim:
A method for estimating a transmission channel in a receiver of an OFDMA signal formed by a plurality of carriers being modulated by data elements and distributed in the time-frequency domain in successive symbols, said plurality of carriers including pilot carriers, modulated by reference data elements known by receivers, wherein said method comprises: a step of receiving by the receiver a series of n symbols of the OFDMA signal, covering at least one resource block; a step of making an initial channel estimation by identifying said pilot carriers included in said series of n symbols; a step of determining diagonal entries of p frequency domain channel matrices G (x) for estimating said channel for at least some x symbols among said n symbols, said x symbols being pilot symbols; and a step of determining, in the frequency domain, at least some non diagonal entries for each frequency domain channel matrix G of said n symbols from said determined diagonal entries of said x frequency domain channel matrices G (x) , wherein said step of determining diagonal entries comprises: a step of transforming said signal from the time domain to the frequency domain, for delivering a corresponding frequency domain signal; a step of estimating, from said frequency domain signal, a first channel estimation in the frequency domain; a step of interpolating said first channel estimation in the frequency domain by employing a linear expression in order to determine diagonal entries of said matrices G (x) , wherein said linear expression comprises: G i , i ( p ) = N ⁢ ( H i , 0 + pT 0 ⁢ E i + ( pT 0 ) 2 ⁢ U i ) + N - 1 2 ⁢ N ⁢ ( E i + 2 ⁢ pT 0 ⁢ U i ) + ( N - 1 ) ⁢ ( 2 ⁢ N - 1 ) 6 ⁢ N ⁢ N ⁢ U i where: p is a symbol index of the (p+1) th received symbol; N is a number of carriers of a symbol; H is the Fourier transform of the channel impulse response for the entry i; T 0 is equal to 1+L CP /N, where L CP is the length of the cyclic prefix; E i and U i are the FFT transformation of basis coefficients for the variation of the channel of a certain time window: U i = [ ( 4 / 7 ) ⁢ ( G i , i ( 7 ) - G i , i ( 0 ) ) - ( G i , i ( 4 ) - G i , i ( 0 ) ) ] 12 ⁢ N ⁢ T 0 2 E i = ( G i , i ( 4 ) - G i , i ( 0 ) ) 4 ⁢ N ⁢ T 0 - U i ⁡ ( N - 1 N + 4 ⁢ T 0 ) .