Patent ID: 7623579

Claim:
A method of demodulating a signal in a transmission system where the modulation includes several substantially orthogonal subcarriers, wherein the vector of the propagation channel H[n,k] is known, or the received signal, including at least pilot symbols transmitting reference data, the method comprising at least one step of: estimating the symbol a[n,k] emitted on the k th subcarrier of the n th symbol of the modulation using a recombination step weighting the various signals received x[n,k] after synchronization and demodulation, wherein the recombination step uses a recombination vector defined by the relation g[n]=R xx −1 [n].r xd [n] (3) where: R xx [n]. is the correlation matrix of a signal to be spatially filtered; and r xd [n] is the vector of intercorrelation between the signal to be spatially filtered and a reference sequence; and wherein the estimation of the correlation matrix and of the intercorrelation vector is performed using the following formulae: R ^ xx ⁡ [ n ] = ∑ l = - L 1 L 2 ⁢ ( ∑ k ∈ K l ⁢ x ⁡ [ n + l , k ] ⁢ x H ⁡ [ n + l , k ] ) ( 4 ) r ^ xa ⁡ [ n ] = ∑ l = - L 1 L 2 ⁢ ( ∑ k ∈ K l ⁢ x ⁡ [ n + l , k ] ⁢ a * ⁡ [ k ] ) ( 5 ) where: the index 1 corresponds to the use of the symbols of the modulation before, L 1 symbols before, and L 2 symbols after the symbol considered so as to improve the estimation of the correlation matrix, K l is the set of indices of the continuous pilots and/or of the dispersed pilots.