Patent ID: 7995683

Claim:
A method for determining a phase error of a received communication signal, the method comprising: determining an early correlation result between the received communication signal and a first copy of the received communication signal; determining a prompt correlation result between the received communication signal and a second copy of the received communication signal, the second copy of the received communication signal phase-lagging the first copy by correlator spacing; determining a late correlation result between the received communication signal and a third copy of the received communication signal, the third copy of the received communication signal phase-lagging the second copy by the correlator spacing; determining a peak correlation result based on the early, the prompt and the late correlation results; and applying the peak correlation result to a discriminator function to cancel out a noise term in a numerator and a denominator of the discriminator function to generate a noise floor independent discriminator function for calculating the phase error as a spacing between the prompt correlation and the peak correlation using a function of the prompt, early and late correlations independent of a noise floor estimate.