Patent ID: 8537936

Claim:
A method of estimating channel quality in receiver operative in a wireless communication network, comprising: receiving a wireless signal from a transmitter; demodulating the received signal to generate initial raw bits; decoding the initial raw bits to generate decoded bits; performing an error check on the decoded bits; generating regenerated raw bits by encoding the decoded bits that pass the error check; comparing the initial raw bits to the regenerated raw bits to determine a raw bit error rate (RBER); and using the RBER to generate a channel quality metric, wherein: the received signal was modulated such that each modulated symbol comprises a plurality of bits, wherein at least one subset of the bits per symbol has a higher error probability than another subset of bits; and comparing the initial raw bits to the regenerated raw bits to determine a RBER comprises comparing only the high error probability subset of initial raw bits per symbol to the regenerated raw bits which correspond thereto.